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SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH 



SERMONS OUT OF 
CHURCH 



BY THE AUTHOR OF 

"JOHN HALIFAX, GENTLEMAN" 






" Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven." 



tl 







LONDON 

DALDY, ISBISTER, & CO. 

56, LUDGATE HILL 

1875 

[The Right of Translation *i reserved.} 



^v 



LONDON : 

PRINTED BY VIRTUE AND CO. 

CITY ROAD. 



CONTENTS, 



SERMON PAGE 

I. WHAT IS SELF-SACRIFICE ? ..... 3 

II. OUR OFTEN INFIRMITIES 43 

III. HOW TO TRAIN . UP A PARENT IN THE WAY HE 

SHOULD GO 87 

IV. BENEVOLENCE — OR BENEFICENCE? . . . -139 
V. MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 1 73 

VI. GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS 215 



Sermon 3L 



c* 



WHAT IS SELF-SACRIFICE? 




B 



I. 



WHAT IS SELF-SACRIFICE ? 

T LATELY saw a drawing, not unknown to 
archaeologists, which, though it might shock 
some people as painfully profane, struck me 
with just the contrary feeling, as being a solemn 
and touching confirmation, from the outside, of 
that internal truth which we call Revelation. It 
was a copy of a street caricature, found, not 
very long ago, on a newly discovered wall — I 
think in Rome — where it had been hidden for 
eighteen hundred years ; — evidently the work of 
some young gamin of the ancient world, and 
depicting a man, after the most primitive style 
of Art, with a round O for his head, an oblong 
O for his body, two lines for legs and arms, and 
five rayed fans for hands and feet. This crea- 
ture stood gazing in adoration upon a similar 



4 WHAT IS SELF-SACRIFICE? 

man, only with an ass's head instead of a human 
one, who hung suspended upon a cross. Under- 
neath was scrawled, in rude Greek letters, 
" A lex aminos worships his God." 

It set me thinking. " Alexaminos worships 
his god." Not God, mind you, but his god ; 
the divinity of his own making, with an ass's 
head on. How many excellent and earnest- 
minded people do much the same ! 

To pull the ass's head off — to show how many 
a ridiculous idol is esteemed divine ; how often 
a so-called virtue is in reality a vice, or slowly 
corrupting into one ; how the sublimest and 
holiest truths may be travestied into actual 
lies — this is the aim of my Sermons out of 
Church. Out of Church : outside each and all of 
those numerous and endlessly diversified creeds 
preached in buildings made with hands ; but 
not, I hope, outside of that universal Church — 
God's consecrated Temple — built without hands, 
" eternal in the heavens." 

Is this iconoclasm ? I cannot think so. Is it 
irreligious ? Surely not ; to those who believe 
that the heart of all religion lies in the words I 



WHAT IS SELF-SACRIFICE? 5 

have put on my title-page, " Thy will be done on 
earth as it is in heaven." But to find out what 
that will is, and — so far as the finite may com- 
prehend the infinite — Him who declares it, this, 
and this alone, is real Christianity. 

Let me begin " at the very beginning," as 
children say — children, in their holy ignorance, 
often so much wiser and nearer heaven than we. 

In first planning this first sermon, I entitled it 
" The Sin of Self-sacrifice ; " because I have 
noticed, as one of the sad and strange things 
in life, what folly, what misery, what actual 
wickedness, result from the exaggeration of this 
particular virtue, esteemed the highest of all, the 
very key-stone and crown of our faith. But 
considering the point, and feeling that such 
a title might startle weaker brethren, and give 
an impression that I meant what I do not 
mean, and that my Sermons out of Church 
are also out of the pale of all Christianity, I 
have abstained, and simply commence with the 
open question — What is self-sacrifice ? 

The most obvious answer is this. Self-sacrifice 
means the sacrifice of one's self, one's personal 



6 WHAT IS SELF-SACRIFICE? 

ego, with its aims and desires, to something or 
somebody else. Then, in this transaction, is the 
most important element the self which is sacri- 
ficed, or the object which it is sacrificed to ? In 
other words, granted that self-sacrifice is a good 
thing, which side is to reap the good ? Or is 
there to be a third consideration, more im- 
portant than either — its end and aim ? And 
what is its end and aim ? 

A moralist might answer, "Absolute truth, 
absolute right." A Christian, knowing how 
difficult it is to define either, might reply, 
" God ; " which involves three necessities — the 
comprehension of Him, the worship of Him, 
and the duty and delight of obeying Him. 
Briefly, God and His will, so far as we know 
it, must be the only right end of self-sacri- 
fice. 

Then, what is its beginning ? — the passion 
from which it takes its rise ? Usually, nay, 
universally, that passion which is the heart of 
the universe — love. The root of all true self- 
sacrifice is some strong affection, which makes 
the welfare of the beloved of more importance 



WHAT IS SELF-SACRIFICE ? 7 

to us than our own, or an equally strong devo- 
tion to a principle, which is merely an abstract 
form of the same emotion. Both these motives 
are noble — and ignoble likewise, sometimes ; for 
the latter is often alloyed by ambition, egotism, 
obstinacy, love of power ; while the former is 
seldom free from that recondite but very 
common selfishness, the hope of having our 
self-sacrifice duly appreciated. Very few of 
the most devoted of our lovers and friends 
would come up to the standard I once heard 
given of true affection : " He might die for you, 
but he would never let you know it." 

Now most of your self-sacrificers take abun- 
dant pains to let you know it. When they 
offer themselves up, it is with a lurking hope 
that not only the object of so much devotion, 
but a select circle of sympathizing admirers, 
may be present at their immolation. The heroic 
self-control which "dies and makes no sign" 
is a virtue of which very few are capable. 
As I once heard commented by a small but 
sage commentator on the poem of "Enoch 
Arderj," "Yes, it was very good of Enoch 



8 WHAT IS SELF-SACRIFICE? 

not to tell his story until he died, but, mama, 
what a pity he didn't die and say nothing at 
all!" 

There is another view of martyrdom which 
deserves a word. It may be a very grand 
thing, despite its pains, for the martyr, who 
has made his choice, accepted his fate, and is 
prepared to go up in a cloud of glory to heaven ; 
not unconscious, perhaps, of the eyes that will 
be following him thither. But what of those 
who have permitted or exacted the sacrifice ? 
And suppose it has been offered foolishly, need- 
lessly ; perhaps even in some bitter outburst of 
feeling not quite so holy as the act appears ? 
Before we lay ourselves down before Jugger- 
naut, is it not as well to see if he is a god, or 
only an ugly idol ? And in preparing our 
suttee, should we not pause to consider how far 
we are really benefiting the affectionate friends 
who come to assist thereat ? Possibly the role 
of victim which we are so anxious to play 
may affix upon some one else the corresponding 
title of murderer. 

He who causes his brother to err is himself a 



WHAT IS SELF-SACRIFICE ? 9 

sinner. Now do you see what I mean by the sin 
of self-sacrifice ? 

A sin to which I fear women are much more 
prone than men. It is apparently a law of the 
universe that the male animal should be always 
more or less a selfish animal. No doubt there 
is some reason in this, some good reason ; in- 
deed we can almost trace that. A large ego is 
oftentimes necessary to enable a man to hold 
his own in the hard battle of life ; and the creed 
of " self-preservation is the first law of nature," 
which presents itself so forcibly to the mind of 
the ordinary man, in all phases of society, from 
the savage to the sybarite, may contribute 
a good deal to the advantage of the species. 
Be that as it may be, I am afraid it must 
be owned that, with some noble exceptions, 
men are, as a rule, ignobly and incurably 
selfish. But it remains to be proved how far 
they are so in themselves, or how far it is 
the women's fault, who, by this exaggeration 
of unselfishness, this sinful self-sacrifice, help 
to make them what they are. 

Despite all the fancies of lovers and poets, 



10 



WHAT IS SELF-SACRIFICE ? 



throughout life, women are the offerers, and 
men the accepters, of an amount of devotion 
which would ruin an angel. They are the 
slaves who manufacture the tyrants. 

Yet how sweet and charming it is to be a 
slave — at first. To a loving-hearted woman for 
love's sake, to a weak one because it saves 
trouble, lightens responsibility, and flatters that 
self-conscious vanity which, if we tear off its 
saintly robes, underlies so much devotion, ama- 
tory as well as religious, female devotion espe- 
cially. 

" He for God only — she for God in him." 

So wrote Milton, and few men ever wrote a 
more false or dangerous line. Why, — though it 
may be less nattering to the man, less easy for 
the woman, — why should not she as well as he 
live " for God only " ? Why, instead of seeing 
no medium between blind idolatry or childish 
subserviency, and a frantic struggle after im- 
possible " rights," should she not accept calmly 
her plain duty, to be man's help-meet, and assist 
him in doing his duty, before the world and be- 
fore God ? 



WHA T IS SELF- S A CRIFICE ? 1 1 

Instead, how many, knowingly or unknow- 
ingly, do their very utmost not to amend but to 
destroy the objects of their love ? For women 
will love men, and all the philosophers in petti- 
coats, or less graceful habiliments, who aim at 
remodelling society, free from the old-fashioned 
folly of wifehood and motherhood, will never 
succeed in conquering this amiable weakness. 
It is all very well to pretend that women are the 
adored and men the adorers ; so they are, for 
a year or two, and towards one or two women — 
but at the beginning and end of life, and all 
through it, save during the brief courtship-time, 
it is the business of their womenkind — mothers, 
sisters, wives, daughters — to worship them, to 
serve them, to obey them. Every man in his 
secret heart recognises this fact, and is com- 
placently satisfied that it should remain a fact, 
for ever. 

Well, let it be so ! Perhaps the "Whole Duty 
of Woman " is man ; but it is in order that she 
may be the agent for making him into a real 
man, fulfilling all the noble aims of manhood. 

Gay, in his "Acis and Galatea/' has one fine 



12 



WHAT IS SELF-SACRIFICE ? 



line — finer, perhaps, than he meant it to be. 
The nymph, changing her dead shepherd into 
a fountain, says, 

" Be thou immortal, since thou art not mine." 

And any woman who ever truly loved a man 
would desire to make him so — not " hers," 
perhaps, but " immortal ; ' that is, what he 
ought to be, in himself, and towards God and 
man. If, instead, she thinks only of what he 
is to her, and what she wishes to be to him, 
her love will prove, despite all its passionate 
or affectionate disguises, not his blessing, but 
his life-long curse. 

This, though she may have shown towards 
him any amount of self-sacrifice and blind de- 
votion. If women's devotedness to men in 
any relation of life teaches the latter to be 
selfish, lazy, exacting, imperious, the act is 
not a merit but a sin, and causes their beloved 
ones to sin. In the cant phrase, which while 
I use I detest, they are " setting the creature 
above the Creator," and will surely reap — and 
deserve — their punishment. Not, as some theo- 



WHA T IS SELF- S A CRIFICE ? 1 3 

logians put it, in the divine revenge of a 
jealous God, angry that any poor mortal is 
loved beyond Himself — but as the inevitable 
result of that perfect law : " The soul that 
sinneth it shall die." It must ; for in all sin 
is the seed of death, and God Himself, unless 
by changing His all-righteous essence, could 
not make it otherwise. 

Therefore, if a mother by overweening indul- 
gence helps her son to become a thoughtless 
scapegrace ; if a wife by cowardly subserviency 
converts her husband into a selfish brute ; even 
if a daughter — as in a late case of somewhat 
notable literary biography — sets up a weak, 
luxurious, unprincipled father as the idol of 
her life, and expects everybody to bow down 
and worship him ; — all these foolish women have 
condoned sin, and called vice virtue ; have left 
the truth and believed, or pretended to believe, 
a lie. When their false god falls, or turns 
into an avenging demon, then they come to 
understand what means the sin of self-sacri- 
fice. 

Sinful, in one sense, because it is often only 



1 4 WHA T IS SELF- SA CRIFICE ? 

a disguised form of a rather ugly quality — self- 
will. 

I heard the other day enthusiastic praises of 
a sister in one of those Protestant communities 
who are trying — and not unwisely — to emulate 
the Roman Catholic sisters of mercy, by ab- 
sorbing into useful work the many waifs and 
strays of useless spinsterhood, eating their 
hearts out in lonely, aimless idleness in the 
midst of a struggling and suffering world. 
But this woman was not lonely. She had a 
father, whom she paid a nurse to take care 
of; married sisters, who would have been 
thankful for her occasional help in their busy, 
anxious homes ; loving friends, to whom her 
influence and aid might often have been in- 
valuable. Yet she left them, one and all, and 
went to spend her strength — not so very 
great — upon strangers. She did expend it ; for 
she died, and was almost canonised by some 
people; but some others, with a simpler 
standard of holiness, might question whether 
this devoted self-sacrifice should not be called 
by another name — self-will. She did the thing 



WHAT IS SELF-SACRIFICE? 15 

she wished to do, rather than what seemed 
laid before her to do ; and, though it is always 
difficult to judge such cases from the outside 
without being unjust to somebody, I think it 
is an open question whether she did right or 
wrong. 

The same doubt arises when one hears of 
soldiers, volunteering — not sent, but volunteer- 
ing — on dangerous expeditions, leaving young 
wives or helpless children to endure at home the 
agony of suspense over a risk which was not 
demanded by duty; — of missionaries, quitting 
the unobtrusive, useful work of a parish priest 
in trying to win poor Hodge from his drink, 
or Black Jem from his poaching, for the more 
exciting duty of converting a handful of savages, 
at a cost of about three hundred pounds per 
head, and at last making them not so very 
much better Christians than either Hodge or 
Jem, if these only had an equal chance of 
spiritual instruction. 

Lastly, I own that I have no ardent admira- 
tion for those religious devotees of any sort — 
High Church, Low Church, or no church at all — 



1 6 WHA T IS SELF-SA CRIFICE ? 

who, obeying an often imaginary call, " Come 
out from among them, and be ye separate/' 
think that it is "the will of the Lord" they 
should break the hearts of parents, alienate 
fond friends, renounce the plain duties of daily 
life — and all for what ? To " save their soul," 
as they term it ! As if the saving of their own 
petty individual soul — whatever that phrase 
may mean — was a good worth the cost of so 
much actual evil, and to so many other souls ! 

Understand me. I do not deny that there is 
such a thing as conversion — nay, sudden con- 
version ; that even in this noisy nineteenth 
century, as once on the silent shores of Galilee, 
a man may hear the voice, " Follow Me," and, 
leaving all, may follow Him, to wearing life- 
long work in East-end parishes, or in scarcely 
less barbarous foreign lands. But let him be 
quite sure first who it is that calleth him, and 
let him take care that the sacrifice offered is 
really to God, and not to his own restless, 
excitable, unsatisfied imagination ; that, in 
short, it is not a sacrifice to self, rather than 
a self-sacrifice. 



WHA T IS SELF-SA CRIF1CE ? 1 7 

For such, alas ! are a great many of the 
immolations I am dealing with; especially 
among women. Women, who are so strong 
in their capabilities of loving, are above all 
liable to that guiltiness in the form of loving, 
which does incalculable harm to its object. 
That is a short-sighted affection, indeed, which 
causes us to help another to do wrong instead 
of right. When our unselfishness makes others 
selfish ; — when we submit to their injustice, 
condone their offences, call their errors follies, 
and their follies pretty " lovablenesses ;" — then 
we love them in a mean, unworthy way; we 
are not devotees, but idolaters. 

There are women — sisters and wives — tied 
to men so unworthy of the bond, that their 
only safe course is, not obedience, but a little 
righteous rebellion. There are men, beginning 
life as very good men, who are seen slowly 
growing into the bores, the torments, the 
laughing-stocks of their more clear-sighted 
friends; eaten up with vanity, intolerable 
through self-assertion, just because their 
womenkind love them — not rationally, but ir- 



1 8 WHA T IS SELF-SA CRIFICE ? 

rationally; put them on a pedestal and worship 
them, expecting everybody else to do the same. 
But everybody does not, and so this self- 
devotion only makes its object ridiculous, if 
not contemptible, except to the poor enthusiasts, 
who go on adoring him still, half from habit, 
half from fear. 

For fear is the root of many a so-called self- 
sacrifice. Weak natures find it so much easier 
to submit to a wrong than to fight against it. 
Less trouble also. Many lazy women prefer 
getting their own way in an underhand, round- 
about fashion, by humouring the weaknesses 
of the men they belong to, instead of honourably 
and openly resisting them, when resistance be- 
comes necessary. That is, using the right — the 
only honest " right" a woman has, of asserting 
her independent existence before God and men, 
as a responsible human being, who will neither 
be forced to do wrong herself, nor see another 
do wrong, if she can help it. 

Yet how many women not only err them- 
selves, but aid and abet error, knowing it to be 
such, under the compulsion of that weak fear 



WHA T IS SELF- SA ORIFICE ? 1 9 

of man, which is called or miscalled " conjugal 
obedience." 

Here-^— I can almost see my readers shudder 
— " What ! not obey one's husband ? What ! 
counsel rebellion in our wives ?" 

Stop a moment. I never said so. On the 
contrary, I say distinctly, Wives, obey your 
husbands, as children your parents — " in the 
Lord." But only "in the Lord." Yield as 
much as possible in ordinary things ; conquer 
your tempers, modify your tastes ; give up every- 
thing, in short, that is not a compromise of 
principle. When it comes to that, resist ! 
Whatever they may be to you, and how great 
soever your love for them, resist them. Never 
allow either father, husband, brother, son, to 
stand between you and the clear law of right 
and wrong in your own soul, which the God 
who made you has put there. If you do, you 
fall into that sin of which I speak, and will as- 
suredly, soon or late, earn its bitter wages. 

For how sad it is to see wives, whose husbands 
are inclined to extravagance, deny themselves 
not only lawful luxuries, but needful comforts, 



2 o WHA T IS SELF-S A CRIFICE ? 

in order to make up silently for the wilful waste 
against which they had not the courage to pro- 
test; when, perhaps, a few words, tender as 
true, would have brought the man to his right 
senses, and prevented his friends from calling 
him, as of course they do (behind his back), a 
selfish, pleasure-loving brute. And why should 
other men, crotchety, worrying, or bad-tempered, 
though not really bad fellows at heart, slowly 
become the torment of a whole household, be- 
cause the mistress considers it her bounden 
duty to force everybody into yielding to what 
she euphuistically terms "papa's little ways"? 
Can she not see that she is thereby destroying 
all domestic comfort, and teaching both servants 
and children to avoid, to fear, nay, actually to 
dislike, one whom they ought to honour and love ? 
A grain of moral courage on her part, an honest 
appeal to that generosity which lies hid in most 
men's hearts, would have helped the wife to 
help her husband, and, by teaching him to 
restrain himself, make him a far better and 
happier man than if he had been tamely yielded 
to, and so converted into a sort of family ogre, 



WHAT IS SELF-SACRIFICE? 21 

which, little as they suspect it, a good many men 
really are in private life. 

And I think the ogre's wife in Hop-o'-my- 
Thumb is a very good illustration of your 
meek, self-sacrificing, self-devoted wives — who 
after all sometimes end in assisting themselves, 
as she did, to become happy widows. Mean- 
time, they "do their duty" most obediently; 
will even help in the fattening of children for 
their lord's provender — other people's children, 
certainly. But there are women who consider 
it a point of duty to immolate their own. 

How many stories one could record in which 
a wife, fancying herself a pattern of conjugal 
obedience, has sacrificed her children just as 
much as Chaucer's "Griseldis" — detestable 
heroine ! — sacrificed hers ; allowing her whole 
family to be worried, bullied, and otherwise evil- 
entreated by him whom the law presumes to be 
its guardian and head. 

A misery — which ends not even there. For 
in such households brothers soon learn to treat 
sisters as papa treats mamma, with rough words, 
ceaseless grumblings, selfish exactingnesses. 



22 WHAT IS SELF-SACRIFICE? 

Daughters, brought up to hush their voices 
or run away whenever the father's step is heard 
— papa, who generally comes home cross, and 
requires to be coaxed and "soothed "by mamma 
whenever she wants anything — these girls, ac- 
customed to be considered inferior animals, who 
must get their own way by stratagem, grow up 
into those designing young ladies, who owe 
their power over men to first flattering and then 
deceiving them. 

But what a future for the new generation ! 
How many unhappy girls have paid dearly for 
the early upbringing of their young husbands, 
who, the first glamour of love passed, treat their 
wives as they were allowed to treat their sisters, 
and as they saw their fathers treat their mothers, 
carelessly, disrespectfully, with a total want of 
that considerate tenderness which is worth all 
the passionate love in the world. This — though 
they may pass muster outside as excellent 
husbands, never doing anything really bad, and 
possessing many good and attractive qualities, 
yet contriving somehow quietly to break the 
poor womanly heart, or harden it into that 




WHAT IS SELF-SACRIFICE? 23 

passive acceptance of pain, which is more fatal 
to married happiness than even temporary- 
estrangement. Anger itself is a safer thing than 
stolid, hopeless indifference. 

The best husbands I ever met came out of a 
family where the mother, a most heroic and self- 
denying woman, laid down the absolute law, 
" Girls first." Not in any authority ; but first 
to be thought of, as to protection and tender- 
ness. Consequently, the chivalrous care which 
these lads were taught to show to their own 
sisters naturally extended itself to all women. 
They grew up true gentlemen — gentle men — 
generous, unexacting, courteous of speech and 
kind of heart. In them was the protecting 
strength of manhood, which scorns to use its 
strength except for protection ; the proud 
honesty of manhood, which infinitely prefers 
being lovingly and openly resisted, to being 
" twisted round one's finger," as mean men are 
twisted, and mean women will always be found 
ready to do it; but which, I think, all honest 
men and brave women would not merely dislike, 
but utterly despise. 



24 WHAT IS SELF-SACRIFICE ? 

It seems, hitherto, as if of this sin of self- 
sacrifice women were oftenest guilty. Not 
always. 

I have spoken of tyranny; there is nothing so 
absolute as the tyranny of weakness. Some- 
times a really good man will suffer himself to 
be so victimized by a nervous, silly, selfish wife, 
that he dare not call his soul his own. By a 
thousand underhand ways, she succeeds in 
alienating him from his own family — breaking 
his natural ties, hindering his most sacred duties ; 
putting a stop to his honest work in the world — 
his rightful influence therein, and all the plea- 
sures that belong thereto. And these being, to 
a man, so much wider than any woman's, the 
loss is the greater, the pain the sharper. 

One can imagine a large-minded, honourably 
ambitious man actually writhing under the 
sacrifices forced from him by a wife, feeble in 
every way — who destroys not merely his happi- 
ness, but his good reputation. Since, when it is 
seen that her merest whims are held by him of 
paramount importance — that her silly, selfish 
Yes or No is to decide every action of his life, do 



WHAT IS SELF-SACRIFICE ? 25 

not his friends laugh at him behind his back, 
even though before his face they may keep up 
a decorous gravity ? " Poor fellow ! with such a 
goose for his wife ! " Yet the pity is akin to 
contempt; and something more than contempt 
is felt — especially by his mother, sisters, or 
critical female friends — towards that wife, who 
exacts from him the renunciation of all his 
duties, except those towards herself; in plain 
English, " makes a fool of him," because in his 
devotion he has offered everything to her, and 
she has meanly accepted the sacrifice. 

He ought never to have made it. He ought 
to have given her care, tenderness, affection — 
all that man should give to woman, and strength 
to weakness ; but there it should have ended. 
No wife has a right to claim the husband's 
whole life, its honourable toil, its lawful enjoy- 
ments. If she cannot share, she should learn 
at least not to stand in the way of either. And 
the man who submits to be so tyrannized over — 
as weak women in their small way can tyran- 
nize, with that " continual dropping that weareth 
away the • stone" — deserves all he gets ; his 



2 6 WHA T IS SELF-S A CRIFICE ? 

friends' covert smiles, his enemies' unconcealed 
sneer. 

We talk a great deal about the error of 
" spoiling " our children ; may we not "spoil" our 
wives, our husbands, not to speak of other less im- 
portant ties, quite as much, and as sinfully ? For 
life is a long course of mutual education, which 
ends but with the grave. If we are wise enough 
to recognise this, and act upon it, nor be afraid 
of that accidental attrition which only rubs off 
inevitable angles — if, in short, our aim in all the 
dear bonds of existence is not so much to please 
either ourselves or one another, but to do right — 
which means pleasing God — then all is well. But 
if we shirk the right, and accept the agreeable — 
if we expect life to be all holidays and no school, 
then we shall soon begin to find out its utter 
weariness and worthlessness, to blame the faith- 
less, ungrateful world — as if good done with the 
expectation of gratitude were ever worth any- 
thing ! And we shall come to the end of it all 
with a dreary sense of having renounced every- 
thing and gained nothing, except, perhaps, the 
poor consolation of considering ourselves martyrs. 









WHAT IS SELF-SACRIFICE 7 27 

And why ? Because we mistook the boundary 
where virtue passes into vice — self-devotion 
into blind and foolish, nay, sinful self-sac- 
rifice. 

There is a point beyond which we have no 
right to ignore our own individuality — that is, 
supposing we have any. Many people have 
none. They get the credit of being extremely 
self-denying, because they really have no par- 
ticular self to deny. Their feeble nature is only 
capable of imitating others ; and their stagnant 
placidity is no absolute virtue, but the mere 
negation of a vice. Even as there are many 
most " respectable ** people, whom nothing 
keeps from being villains, except one fortunate 
fact — that they are such arrant cowards. 

But to those born with decided tastes, feel- 
ings, possibly talents, the exercise of all these 
is an actual necessity. And lawfully so. If 
God has given us our little light, what right 
have we to hide it under a bushel, because some 
affectionate, purblind friend dislikes the glare of 
it, or fears it will set the house on fire ? No ; let 
us put it in its proper place, a safe candlestick, 



2 8 WHA T IS SELFS A ORIFICE ? 

if it be a light, but let nobody persuade or force 
us to put it out. 

What bitter sacrifices one member of a family- 
gifted with a strong proclivity, perhaps even a 
genius, for art, music, or literature, sometimes has 
to make to the rest, who cannot understand it ! 

Now, a one-sided enthusiast — a Bernard Pal- 
lissy for instance — makes a very disagreeable 
husband and a still worse father of a family ; and 
a modern Corinne, with her hair down her back, 
sitting playing the harp all da,y long, instead of 
going into her kitchen, ordering her dinner, 
and looking after her servants, would be a 
most aggravating wife for any man to marry. 
But, on the other hand, a gentleman with no 
ear for music, married to a wife who is a born 
musician, may make a very great victim of that 
poor lady. And the pretty commonplace girl, 
whom a clever man of poetical nature has 
idealized into an angel in the house, some- 
times succeeds in slowly but completely extin- 
guishing in him that higher life of heart and 
intellect — the spiritual life, compared to which 
the worldly life is mere dust and ashes, and 






WHAT IS SELF-SACRIFICE? 29 

even the domestic life, sweet as it is, a body 
without a soul. 

We ought always to be chary in allowing our- 
selves to be forced into sacrifices which do not 
benefit, but merely gratify the persons exacting 
them. First, because a person who can be grati- 
fied by a self-sacrifice is — rather a mean person ; 
secondly, because to renounce any innocent taste 
or pursuit is not merely foolish, but wrong. All 
our talents were given us to use ; not to bury in 
a napkin. If we do so bury them, to please even 
the dearest friend on earth, we are guilty of not 
merely cowardice, but infidelity to our trust ; and 
depend upon it, the sacrifice will do no good to 
that other person and great harm to ourselves. 
To say nothing of the sneering comments of 
outsiders, and the just condemnation of wiser 
folk, to which we expose — not ourselves, we 
are exalted into martyrs — but those we love, if 
we love them so foolishly as to suffer them to 
victimize us unnecessarily. 

And very sad to see is the extent to which 
some people are victimized in domestic life ; from 
bad health — bad temper, acting and reacting 



3 o WHAT IS SELF-SACRIFICE ? 

upon each other, and both equally blamable 
for miserable as the sufferers are, the cause of 
their sufferings is often nobody but themselves. 
To maintain a sound mind in a sound body, so as 
to be a help instead of a burthen, not to say a 
nuisance, to our family and friends, requires an 
amount of self-control of which not everybody is 
capable. Some people consider it " silly " to 
be careful of health, and others find it so "in- 
teresting" to be ill — that the amount of pain, 
worry, and anxiety which is inflicted by those 
who allow themselves to fall into absolutely 
preventible illness is very great. Equally 
great is the self-sacrifice entailed upon kindly 
people, who cannot stand by and see others 
suffer, although deservedly, without coming to 
the rescue with every help they can bring. 

How often, too, do we see in a family, not 
otherwise unamiable, one especial " root of bit- 
terness," a thoroughly ill-conditioned person, 
of whom all the rest stand in dread, to whom 
they give up everything, and for whom they 
will do anything, just for the sake of peace. 
Long habit has perhaps half accustomed them 



WHA T IS SELF-SA CRIFICE ? 3 1 

to the torment; they have learned to walk 
pretty steadily under it, like a man with a 
nail in his shoe — but what a torment it is ! A 
person who takes everything amiss, whose mood 
you never can be sure of for a single hour, whom 
you are obliged to propitiate, as the savages 
their idols ; one whom you must be on your 
guard with, and make perpetual apologies for, 
lest the world outside should surmise anything 
wrong — with whom you never can find any rest, 
and though he or she may be your nearest and 
dearest, ostensibly, you are painfully conscious 
that the only relief is to get away from him, or to 
get him away. 

I have grave doubts whether in a case of this 
kind — and we all know many such, though we 
are too polite to say so — it is not the duty of a 
conscientious head of a family, or its members, 
to take very strong measures. There are some 
people so intolerable to live with that nobody 
should be allowed to live with them. Every 
effort should be made by the family which un- 
happily owns them, to free itself from them, in 
any lawful way, and at any cost of money or 



3 2 WHA T IS SELF- S A CRIFICE ? 

inconvenience. Some who are an absolute tor- 
ture to their own relations, do well enough with 
strangers ; the self-restraint they then are ob- 
liged to exercise is a wholesome discipline for 
them, and the people they afflict, being farther 
off, are not so deeply afflicted as their own kith 
and kin. 

Would it not be worth while, if, instead of 
lauding to the skies the self-sacrifice of a family 
in thus victimizing itself, we were to institute 
an Asylum for Family Nuisances, to which could, 
be removed the cross-grained brother or sister, 
the cantankerous aunt, the " difficult " relative 
of any sort, whom, if not a relative, the other 
members of the household would fly from as 
from something harmful and hateful? Instead, 
they go on enduring and enduring, till the harm 
becomes irremediable. Which is the worst, to 
put a detestable thing or person so far from you 
that you cease to feel anything towards him save 
a mild indifference ? or to suffer yourself and 
others to be so tormented by him, that the 
sanctimonious " if it would please God to 
take him " — which is only an elegant form 



? 



WHA T IS SELF- S A CRIFICE ? 3 3 

of murder — ceases to appear wrong, only 
natural ? 

Yet this is what your vaunted self-sacrifice 
leads to, when perpetrated for the sake of un- 
worthy people. 

But there are people, amiable, interesting, 
affectionate (externally), to whom one some- 
times sees whole families sacrificing themselves, 
without the slightest sense of the harm they 
are doing, — I mean the " ne'er-do-weels." Not 
the people who do actual evil, but the people 
who never do good. Of such is the weak, 
amiable, impecunious brother who always 
comes back and back, to drain the last half- 
penny from his hard-working sisters. Perhaps 
he has no vices whatever, is of a pleasant 
and not un affection ate nature, only somehow 
he contrives to let everything slip through 
his fingers — money, time, opportunity. And as 
he in reality thinks of nobody but himself, of 
course he marries early and rashly, and brings 
his wife and family to be kept by his sisters, 
' who go on impoverishing themselves year by 
year, doing not only their duty — all sisters must 

D 



34 WHAT IS SELF-SACRIFICE ? 

do that— but a great deal more than their duty ; 
submitting to endless exactions, allowing not 
only the feeble, who are a natural burden, but 
the strong, the self-indulgent, the extravagant, 
to live upon them, and drain the life-blood out 
of them, till death comes in mercy to end the 
never-ceasing sacrifice. A sacrifice which has 
done no good to anybody ; for it has left the 
selfish selfish still, and the extravagant as reck- 
less as ever ; perhaps worse than ever, from the 
long habit of receiving supplies from others, 
instead of earning their luxuries, if they must 
have them, for themselves. The life-long devo- 
tion of a whole family to one unworthy mem- 
ber has been no more than pouring water into a 
sieve ; it has never benefited him, and it has 
ruined the rest. 

Another, though rarer case, and less patent to 
the world, we sometimes see, in which a number 
of unmarried sisters hang round a kind brother, 
as their natural guardian ; which he is, within 
certain limits. But these limits the amiable, 
helpless women do not see. He enters the 
flower of his age, he passes it, yet still he cannot 






WHA T IS SELF- S A CRIFICE ? 3 5 

marry — could not possibly do it, without turning 
his sisters out of doors. He shrinks from that ; 
shrinks, too, from offering such an encumbered 
hand and heart to any girl. And besides, it is 
not every girl who in marrying likes to marry 
a. whole family. So time slips on ; the more 
high-minded and generous the man is, the more 
complete is his sacrifice. Perhaps he gets 
habituated to it, and almost content in it — but 
it is none the less a sacrifice. He may be a 
good and not unhappy old bachelor, but he 
would have been much better and happier 
married, and in a home of his very own. His 
sisters too, if, though poor, they had ceased to 
be helpless, had gone out into the world and 
earned their own living, or if rich, they had 
made for themselves an independent household, 
how much higher and more perfect lives they 
might have led ! 

Of course, there are exceptions to everything, 
and sometimes a combination of sad destinies, 
mutual disappointments, strong fraternal attach- 
ment, and great natural affinity make these 
households of unmarried brothers and sisters 



3 6 WHAT IS SELF-SACRIFICE? 

very peaceful and honourable substitutes for the 
better and completer domestic life. One has 
seen more than one such ; which is more than a 
resting-place — a visible haven of refuge : not 
only to its inhabitants, but to all around. Yet 
there are others, upon which standers-by look 
with pity not unmixed with indignation. And 
the nobler, the more silent the sacrifice, the 
greater is the sadness of it — even though it 
cannot quite come under the name of sin. 

Self-devotion — God forbid I should ever say a 
word in condemnation of that ! It is the noblest 
thing in all this world, and the rarest — No, not 
rare : few family histories are without some heroic 
or pathetic instance thereof, continued through- 
out whole lives, with unflinching fortitude. And 
could death open the locked records of many a 
heart, how often would some secret be found 
there that would furnish a key to all the history 
of the finished life — some strong, one love — some 
eternal faithfulness,— which all the chances and 
changes of existence could never shake, which 
was the impulse of every thought, the motive 
of every action, the compelling force of every line 






WHAT IS SELF-SACRIFICE? 37 

of conduct. A devotion, not a passion, inas- 
much as it was able to set itself entirely aside — 
absorb itself in the well-being of the other, 
whose good it sought, without reckoning any 
personal cost, through weal and woe, pleasure and 
pain, requital or non-requital. This is a sight — 
not to blame or weep over, but to rejoice in : for 
it is not blind self-sacrifice ; it is open-eyed self- 
devotion — blessed on both sides, both to the 
giver and receiver. It has sharp agonies some- 
times — what deep emotion is without them ? 
but out of all come peace and content. It is 
pleasing in God's sight as lovely in man's, 
because there is no sin in it, no selfishness on 
either side ; and in its very sadness— it must of 
necessity be often sad — there is a sacredness 
beyond all mortal joy. 

Of all forms of self-devotion, the one which, 
even when it amounts to absolute self-sacrifice, 
we cannot but regard with very tender and lenient 
eyes, is the devotion of the young to the old, 
of children to parents. No doubt, there is a 
boundary beyond which even this ought not to 
be permitted ; but the remedy lies on the elder 



3 8 WHA T IS SELF-SA CRIFICE ? 

side. There are such things as unworthy, selfish, 
exacting parents, to whom duty must be done, 
simply for the sake of parenthood, without 
regarding their personality. " Honour thy father 
and thy mother" is the absolute command, 
bounded by no proviso as to whether the 
parents are good or bad. Of course no one can 
literally " honour " that which is bad — still one 
can respect the abstract bond, in having patience 
with the individual. 

But I think every high or honourable instinct 
in human nature will feel that there is hardly 
a limit to be set to the devotion of a child to a 
good parent — righteous devotion, repaying to 
failing life all that its own young life once 
received, of care and comfort and blessing. 
And no good, or even moderately good parent 
is ever likely to allow this devotion to pass into 
self-sacrifice. Surely, as long as conscious- 
ness and reason lasted, all true fathers and 
mothers would prevent, in all possible ways, the 
complete absorption of the younger life into 
theirs; nor allow their poor expiring flame 
to be kept alight a few years, a few months, 



WHAT IS SELF-SACRIFICE? 39 

by the vital breath of a far more valuable 
existence. 

But if such a case does happen — the child alone, 
and no outsider, has a right to decide upon the 
due extent of the sacrifice, and how far it is ne- 
cessary or beneficial, even to the aged sufferers 
themselves. There may be a point beyond which 
the most affectionate child has no right to go — 
but must pause and judge whether a duty, which 
inevitably overrides all other duties, has not 
in it something amiss ; even as a love which de- 
stroys all other loves, cannot fail to deteriorate 
the whole being. 

And here, reasoning in a circle, we come round 
to the point from whence we started — " He that 
loveth father or mother " — or any other — " more 
than Me" — that is, he who allows his love for 
them to make them err against Me — "is not 
worthy of Me." Therefore all self-sacrifice, made] 
solely for the love of man, or for the gratification 
of some merely human ambition, is not a 
righteous but a sinful thing — and, as sin, will 
assuredly find its punishment. 

This furnishes, apparently, a solution to 



40 WHAT IS SELF-SACRIFICE ? 

the great mystery, why so many noble self- 
sacrifices are so futile, so aimless, so positively 
injurious ? "I am the Lord thy God ; thou shalt 
have none other Gods but me." If we make to 
ourselves idols, of any sort — that is, if we allow 
love to conquer right, and set aside what we 
ought to do in favour of what we like to do, we 
suffer accordingly — and God Himself, who is 
justice as well as mercy, cannot save us from 
suffering. And this is what I meant when I first 
called this sermon the Sin of Self-sacrifice. 



OUR OFTEN INFIRMITIES, 



II. 



OUR OFTEN INFIRMITIES. 



^\OES it ever occur to those of us who are no 
longer young — who begin to feel this won- 
derful machine a little the worse for wear, while 
its spiritual inmate is as fresh and strong as 
ever, how low apparently is the standard of 
health in this present generation ? How seldom 
among our friends and acquaintances can we 
point out a thoroughly healthy person ? I will 
not even say a robust person, but one who has 
sufficient vitality of body to keep up the daily 
requirements of his mental work, or any sort of 
work, without complaining, without having con- 
tinually to resort to extraneous helps, medical 
or hygienic, wherewith to bolster up his failing 
powers, and make him capable of his necessary 
duties. 



44 OUR OFTEN INFIRMITIES. 

We do not need to reach the first half-century 
of life in order to see our compeers, and alas ! 
too often others much younger in the race, drop 
out of it one by one — sink into miserable valetu- 
dinarians, or, growing old before their time, slip 
from the active enjoyment of life into the mere 
endurance of it. How many among us who only 
yesterday, as it were, seemed ready for an eter- 
nity of youth and labour — to whom threescore 
years and ten appeared all too short for what 
they had to do, now consciously or unconsciously 
echo the pathetic words of one whose name I 
this day write with tears, for Charles Kingsley 
only yesterday a fell on sleep : " — 

" Men must work, and women must weep, 
And the sooner it's over the sooner to sleep." 

Nay, all have not even strength to work, and 
some scarcely enough strength to weep, but 
drop into helpless silence and a weary looking 
forward to that death-slumber which is to them 
the only possible rest. I have heard people say 
they do not even want to " go to heaven ; " they 
only want to go to sleep. They are " so tired." 






OUR OFTEN INFIRMITIES. 45 

Why so ? Why, in an age supposed to be 
thus civilised — over-civilised indeed ; which takes 
such exceeding care of itself, mentally and phy- 
sically ; writes cartloads of medical books and 
makes speeches by the hour on sanitary sub- 
jects, — is r j the old-fashioned health of our^ fore- 
fathers a thing almost unknown ? True, we are 
said to live longer than they did, but what sort 
of life is it ? Do we enjoy the full vigour of a 
sound mind in a sound body, to be used both for 
the service of God and man ; good at work, 
good at play; able to make the very most of 
every hour ? Are we wholesome trees bearing 
fruit to the last, and still keeping " strong and 
well-liking " ? Or do we, immediately after our 
first youth, often before it is ended, begin to fade 
and fail, to grumble at our work, to weary of 
our pleasures, to be pestered ourselves, and, 
worse, to pester all our friends, with our " often 
infirmities"? Not actual sicknesses, but in- 
firmities ; small sufferings of all sorts, and 
a general sense of incapacity for the duties of 
life, which entirely takes away its happy normal 
condition — not to think about one's self at all. 



4 6 



OUR OFTEN INFIRMITIES. 



When a man makes a habit of dwelling upon 
his sins, depend upon it he has a good many sins 
to dwell on ; and he who persists in " investi- 
gating his own inside " will very soon fall, if he 
has not already fallen, into a thoroughly dis- 
eased state. Even as truly good people are 
good without knowing it, so really healthy 
people never notice their health. The perfect 
life is the child's life of absolute unconscious- 
ness. 

But this is a condition so rare nowadays, 
whatever it was in days past, that the question 
of our often infirmities, to borrow an apostolic 
phrase, deserves a sermon quite as much as 
many topics which are discussed in pulpits, 
where it is mostly the fashion to attend to the 
soul first and the body afterwards. 

Not very long ago I heard a clergyman seri- 
ously proclaim that " the Gospel " must first be 
given to the starving, sinning, suffering deni- 
zens of London courts and alleys — the Gospel 
first, and food, clothes, soap and water, and 
decent dwellings afterwards. It is one of the 
trying things of going to church that whatever a 



OUR OFTEN INFIRMITIES. 47 

man says one must hear him ; one cannot stand 
up and contradict him ; else I should like to 
have suggested to this well-meaning but narrow- 
visioned preacher, how much a man's moral 
nature depends upon his surroundings. Diogenes 
might not have been a cynic if he had not lived 
in a tub ; and I doubt if the noblest man alive, 
if compelled to inhabit a pigsty, would long 
remain much better than a swine. 

Therefore it behoves us to take heed that the 
corporeal habitation into which our spirit is put 
— for this life at least — is dealt with as kindly as 
circumstances allow, carefully cherished, swept 
and garnished, and made the most commodious 
residence possible, so as to allow free play to 
its immortal inhabitant. 

It is true — too true, alas ! — that in many in- 
stances this desirable end is neutralised by here- 
ditary weaknesses — the sins of the fathers in- 
evitably visited upon the children ; and by our 
own early faults ignorantly committed, and the 
unalterable circumstances in which our lot is 
placed. We cannot care for ourselves with- 
out sacrificing more than ought to be sacrificed 



48 OUR OFTEN INFIRMITIES. 

by any hnman being to his own individuality. 
But there is a medium course always possible ; 
and sore let and hindered as we may often be, 
I think some of us very often create our own 
hindrances and add weight to our natural bur- 
dens by the want of a certain respect for the 
body, as a faithful servant, out of whom we must 
get a good deal of work before we have done 
with it. 

We generally begin by working it a great 
deal too hard. We rejoice in our youth ; we 
exult in our strength ; we use both recklessly, 
boastfully, as if they were wholly our own to 
do as we liked with, and could never possibly 
wear out. So, in a thousand careless ways, we 
squander vitality, never thinking that we have 
only a certain quantity given us to last till 
death, and that for every atom of wasted health, 
heedlessly wasted — nature, that is God, will 
assuredly one day bring us to judgment. 

Still, we are not wholly to blame. I believe 
many feeble men or delicate women of to-day 
owe the helplessness of their lives to the igno- 
rance of sanitary laws of the parents of forty 






OUR OFTEN INFIRMITIES. 49 

or fifty years ago. Even as fifty years hence 
our children may have to reproach us for that 
system of over-feeding, and especially over- 
drinking, which many doctors now advocate 
for the young generation. I doubt if even the 
calomel powders, jalap and gin, brimstone and 
treacle, of our tormented childhood, were worse 
than the meat three times a day, the brandy 
and the daily glass of wine, poured into innocent 
little stomachs, which naturally would keep to 
the infant's food of bread and milk, and almost 
nothing besides. Certainly, not stimulants. 

This is neither a medical treatise nor a tee- 
total essay, yet, as he is a coward who does not 
openly advance his colours, I do not hesitate 
to say that I believe half the bodily and 
spiritual ailments of this world spring from 
that much misinterpreted and not by any 
means inspired sentence of St. Paul, " Drink 
no longer water, but take a little wine for thy 
stomach's sake and thy often infirmities." How 
often do we hear it quoted. But nobody con- 
siders that the advice was given because of the 
"often infirmities," the origin of which we, of 

E 




50 OUR OFTEN INFIRMITIES. 

course, do not know. That which is most 
valuable as a medicine, is poison when taken 
as a food. To accustom a child, or a youth, to 
strong drinks, is to institute a craving after 
them — a necessity for them — almost more dan- 
gerous than the temporary good, if it be a good, 
effected by their use. 

Most children have an instinctive dislike to 
alcohol in any shape ; unless, indeed, there be 
an hereditary predisposition towards it — of all 
predispositions the most fatal. Any one who 
knows the strong pureness of a constitution 
which has received from two or three temperate 
generations an absolute indifference to stimu- 
lants, can hardly overvalue the blessing it is 
to a child, boy or girl, to bring it up from 
babyhood in the firm faith that wine, beer, and 
spirits are only medicines, not drinks ; that 
when you are thirsty, be you man, woman, or 
child, the right and natural beverage for you 
is water, and only water. If you require it, if 
you have been so corrupted by the evil influences 
of your youth, or the luxurious tastes of your 
after years, that you "cannot drink water," 









OUR OFTEN INFIRMITIES. 51 

either there is something radically diseased in 
your constitution, or you will soon bring your- 
self to that condition. Long before you are 
middle-aged you will have no lack of " often 
infirmities. " 

I could write pages on the folly — the abso- 
lute madness, of parents, in allowing unlimited 
beer to growing lads, daily glasses of wine to 
over-worked, delicate girls. Nay, descending 
to the very root of things, I would implore all 
parents who wish their sons to have the strength 
of a Samson, to remember Manoah's wife, 
and suffer neither doctors nor old women to 
persuade them that strong drinks are essential 
to even a nursing mother ; but that that mother 
is specially wise, specially blessed — ay, and her 
children will rise up and call her so — who has 
had the self-restraint and courage to make them, 
before their birth and after, in the solemn lan- 
guage of Holy Writ, " Nazarites from their 
mother's womb." 

To " drink no wine nor strong drink," to be 
absolutely independent of the need for it, or 
the temptation to it, — any young man or woman 



52 OUR OFTEN INFIRMITIES. 

brought up on this principle has not only a 
defence against many moral evils, but a physical 
stronghold always in reserve to fall back upon, 
when accidental sickness and the certain feeble- 
ness of old age call for that resource, which I 
do not deny is at times a most valuable one. 
But the advice I would give to the young and 
healthy is this : Save 3^ourselves from all spirit- 
uous drinks, as drinks, as long as ever you can ; 
even as you would resist using a crutch as long 
as you had your own two legs to walk upon. If 
you like wine — well, say honestly you take it be- 
cause you like it, that you prefer indulging your 
palate at the expense of your health ; but never 
delude yourself, or suffer others to delude you, 
that alcohol is a necessity, any more than stays 
or orthopcedic instruments, or strong medicinal 
poisons, or other sad helps which nature and 
science provide to sustain us in our slow but 
sure decay. 

Still, to retard that decay as much as possible, 
to keep up to the last limit the intellectual and 
physical vigour which is such a blessing, not 
only to ourselves but to those about us, this is 



OUR OFTEN INFIRMITIES. 53. 

the religion of the body — too often lost sight of — 
but which I for one count it no heathenism both 
to believe in and to preach. A religion, not a 
superstition ; the reverence and care for the phy- 
sical temple of the divine human soul, without 
in the least sinking to that luxurious Greek philo- 
sophy which considered the body only as worth 
regarding. 

On the contrary, if we must be either Syba- 
rites or Spartans, better be Spartans. The 
harsh and rough upbringing of our grand- 
mothers probably did less harm than the pre- 
sent system of mingled over-care and careless- 
ness. If they thought too little of children, 
made them often poor miserable victims to 
their elders ; we, nowadays, see ourselves 
victimised to the younger generation rather 
too much. They also suffer ; in fact, to use the 
common phrase, are " killed with kindness/' 
Parents will not see that a child is safer turned 
out to play in all weathers than shut up from 
the least breath of wind in nurseries so ill 
ventilated that the air is actually fetid. And 
people who would shudder at the idea of their 



5+ OUR OFTEN INFIRMITIES. 

boys and girls running about barefooted, take 
them (in low-necked, sleeveless muslin frocks, 
which leave exposed the most sensitive region, 
the chest and upper arm, or velvet tunics that 
do not reach to the shivering little knees) — take 
them to children's parties, where they must 
necessarily encounter chills, which to the young 
are absolute death, and eat food which to their 
tender stomachs is all but poison. There they 
stay, in a heated room or in draughty passages, 
sitting up till their innocent eyes are shutting 
with sleep, or blazing with feverish and pre- 
mature excitement, till ten, eleven, and even 
twelve o'clock, and then are carried off to bed. 
Next morning the parents wonder that poor 
little Tommy is cross, or Mary ill, or that Lucy 
and Charlie cannot attend to their lessons as 
they ought to do. How should they ? Whole- 
some amusement — and plenty of it — is essential 
at all ages; and children's society most bene- 
ficial to children; but that pitiful imitation of 
the "show" society now cultivated by fashion- 
able elders, which is- slowly drifting downwards 
to corrupt the children, ought to be resisted by 



OUR OFTEN INFIRMITIES. 55 

wise parents with all their might. Not merely 
on moral, but on simply physical grounds. Any 
person who gives or goes to ordinary "children's 
parties" of this sort is, I think, guilty of a whole- 
sale massacre of the innocents. Worse than 
massacre — slow murder ; for such entertainments 
lay the foundations of half the infirmities of 
which I write, which sap the very springs of life, 
and embitter all its enjoyments. 

If our parents sin against us in our childhood, 
how often do we sin against ourselves in youth 
— that daring youth, which thinks it will always 
last, and resents the slightest interference with 
its whims or its privileges ? It will have what 
it likes, at any cost. What an endless and 
thankless task it is to represent to a young girl 
the common-sense fact, that to put on her warm 
jacket or waterproof cloak, a sensible hat for 
her head, and a stout pair of boots for her feet, 
and go cheerily out, even on the wettest or 
coldest day, will do her no harm, but good — 
bring the roses to her cheeks and the sunshine 
to her spirit ; whereas to cower over the fire in 
a warm woollen dress, and then undress herself 



5 6 OUR OFTEN INFIRMITIES. 

for a ball — to dance till she is heated and 
exhausted, and then go and sit on the stairs 
or by an open window to cool herself — is more 
than folly, it is insanity. But you, poor mother 
or aunt, might talk yourself hoarse; she will 
not listen. The one thing she likes, the other 
she does not like ; and therefore she does the 
first, and will not do the second. 

Young men, also, they will go their own way ; 
sow their wild oats — and reap them. I do not 
speak of extreme cases of reckless dissipation, 
upon which retribution follows only too swift 
and sure, but of small dissipations, petty sins. 
A young fellow will dance till four in the 
morning several times a week, when he knows 
that every day in the week he must be at his 
office at nine — and is, being an honest fel- 
low who wishes to get on in the world. But 
he does not consider how much he takes out 
of himself in life, and health, and strength ; and 
sometimes out of his master's pocket too ; for, 
with the best intentions, he cannot possibly do 
his work as well as it ought to be done. But 
he, too, does what he likes best to do, and 



OUR OFTEN INFIRMITIES. 57 

deludes himself that it is the best ; and all the 
arguments in the world will never convince him 
to the contrary. 

No more will they convince those other sin- 
ners — whose sin looks so like virtue — the clever 
men who kill themselves with over-study ; — the 
ambitious men who sacrifice everything to the 
mad desire of getting on in the world ; of being 
— not better, or wiser, or greater — but merely 
richer than their neighbours. 

To do work for work's sake, moderately, 
levelly, rationally, so as to preserve the power 
of doing it for the longest term that nature 
allows — this, the noblest aim a man can start 
with, becomes often swamped in the ignoble 
one of working merely to be superior to some- 
body else. Thus many a man who has earned, 
or is earning, enough to live comfortably > and 
bring up his children well — and sufficiently 
well off, too, to begin with a fair start where 
their father did — goes on slaving and toiling, 
his wife aiding and abetting him, in order to 
maintain them in the luxury to which he has 
risen. A paternal devotion, which has its 



58 OUR OFTEN INFIRMITIES. 

touching phase; and yet it is as blind as it 
is foolish. The children would be much better 
left to make their own way, and earn their own 
bread, like their father before them. And the 
father himself, by the time he has accumulated 
the thirty, forty, or fifty thousand which he has 
gradually learned to consider essential to hap- 
piness — she, sly jade! has slipped away from 
him. He catches her, but she is like the 
crushed butterfly that his boys catch under their 
caps ; all her beauty is gone. Utterly worn 
out with work, he can neither enjoy life himself 
nor give enjoyment to other people. The strain 
of occupation gone, his weariness becomes in*- 
tolerable. The irritability that an overtasked 
body and mind superinduces in most men, 
makes him, not a delight, but an actual 
nuisance in his family. Those "often in- 
firmities ' which he had once no time to 
think much about, now rise up like murdered 
ghosts to torment him wherever he goes. His 
handsome house, his country leisure or town 
pleasure, his abundance of friends, and his 
flourishing family, are to him no comfort, no 



OUR OFTEN INFIRMITIES. 59 

resource. He has burnt the candle at both 
ends, and now there is no light left in it ; it 
just flickers awhile, and then — drops out. 

I ask earnestly, Is this picture overdrawn ? 
Do I not paint the likeness — not of one, but of 
hundreds — of rich men among our acquaint- 
ance in this " golden age " ? Midas himself 
could not have more bitterly applied the word. 
The old king of fable, whose touch turned 
everything to gold, was not more wretched 
than some of our would-be millionaires. 

For what is the use of money ? Simply, to 
be used ; to gain a certain amount of bodily 
comfort, for which the poor failing body is, as 
it gets older, only too thankful ; and an equal 
share of intellectual pleasures and tastes, which 
money only can fully supply. Beyond that no 
man can spend, or ought to spend, upon him- 
self. And even this, carefully employed, will 
always leave a large margin for the keenest 
pleasure of all — the money that is spent upon 
other people. 

Idleness may be a great folly, but overwork, 
to no nobler end than to get rich, is a great 



60 OUR OFTEN INFIRMITIES. 

crime. And the men who commit it, and the 
women who encourage them in it, deserve all 
they get, in the secret miseries that underlie all 
their splendours. What these are they know. 
The indigestions of their dinner-parties, the 
weariness of their balls, the worry of their 
servants, the rivalries of their neighbours. 
Who that looks at them as sitting, pallid and 
cross, in their grand carriages, or watches the 
discontent into which their bland dinner-table 
face falls the moment the smile is off it, or 
notices the scarcely veiled relief of the polite 
adieu with which such an entertainment is 
ended — "and a good thing it's over," say both 
host and guest in their secret hearts — who that 
takes quiet heed of all this can help feeling that 
such magnificence has cost very dear ? Le jeuj 
ne vaut pas la chandelle. The paradise may be 
fair enough outside, but u the trail of the 
serpent is over it all." 

This, without any complaints about " this 
poor dying world," or the wickedness of the 
people that are in it. It is a good world, a 
happy world. God meant it to be happy. It 



OUR OFTEN INFIRMITIES. 6r 

is man only who makes it miserable. For one 
half — perhaps nearly the whole — of these often 
infirmities which torment us so, Nature is not 
accountable ; Nature, always a wise and tender 
mother to those who follow her dictates in the 
simplest way. For instance, who will deny 
that a number of those illnesses which we suffer 
from year by year are absolutely preventible 
illnesses ? 

The common answer to that commonest of 
moans, "I have such a bad cold," — "Dear me! 
How did you catch it ? " — often makes us cross 
enough. As if it could be any consolation in 
our sufferings to investigate how we got them ! 
But the remark is not so ridiculous as it seems. 
It would be a curious and useful register of 
personal statistics, if we were to count how 
many of our illnesses we bring on ourselves by 
neglect of those common sanitary laws, which 
can never be broken with impunity. Men of 
science, half of whom allege that nature is all 
benign, the other half that she is wholly cruel, 
seem to be both right and both wrong. She 
is neither kind nor cruel ; she is only just. She 



62 OUR OFTEN INFIRMITIES. 

■ — or a higher Power through her — lays down 
laws, which, so far as we see, are laws for 
the general good; they must be obeyed, and 
by all, or all suffer ; and neither God nor nature 
can prevent this suffering. 

Thus, some illnesses are not preventible. 
They come to us apparently " by the visitation of 
God," from no cause at all ; that is, from recon- 
dite causes, too remote for us either to detect or 
guard against, but no doubt also the result of 
broken laws. We can but try to discover these 
laws, so as to obey them better another time. 
But a large number of our lesser ailments are 
entirely our own fault. We can trace in them 
cause and effect, as plainly as that two and two 
make four. That severe bronchitis which at- 
tacked us, because in the brilliant March sun- 
shine, and fierce east wind, we put off our slightly 
shabby winter jacket in favour of more spring- 
like attire. That horrible sick headache, which 
we know as well as possible will follow after 
eating certain foods or drinking certain wines, 
yet we can no more resist either, than our 
infant boy can resist clutching at the lighted 






OUR OFTEN INFIRMITIES. 63 

candle, or our drunken cabman at the gin- 
bottle. We call the child an " ignorant baby," 
the drunkard "a fool ;" yet in what are we 
better than they ? For the sake of petty vanity, 
or still more petty table-indulgence, we have 
punished ourselves, and tormented our whole 
family. The sickness which comes direct from 
heaven deserves ail sympathy and tenderness : 
that brought on by a mere folly, or weak self- 
indulgence, though it is obliged to be nursed 
and cared for, is done so with a compassion 
bordering on contempt. 

Yes, even though we call our errors by grand 
names, and almost boast of them, " I never 
take care of myself;" "I can't be bothered 
with my health ;" " What does it matter to me 
if I am ill ? " are the remarks one constantly 
hears, especially from the young, just old 
enough to shirk authority and resent inter- 
ference, but still seeing only in the dim distance 
that dark time which must come, sooner or later, 
when for every ill-usage it has received, the 
body avenges itself tenfold. 

Does it not matter indeed ? — the extra labour 



64 OUR OFTEN INFIRMITIES. 

thrown on a whole family when one member 
is ill ? the heart-ache of parents, the perplexity 
and distress of friends, the serious annoyance — 
to put no stronger word — that invalids always are 
in a household ? If, as to our would-be suicides, 
the law of the land, even when it saves them 
from the river half drowned, or cuts them down 
half hanged, sentences them to remorseless 
punishment, should there not be found also 
some fitting condemnation for those who com- 
mit the slow suicide of ruined health, for no 
cause but their own gratification r 

One of the worst forms of these is so counte- 
nanced by society that he is a bold man who 
would lift his voice against it ; I mean the 
present system of dinner-parties. And yet there 
can be no doubt that, if it does not kill whole- 
sale, it injures the average constitutions of what 
we call the " better classes," and causes them 
dyspeptic and other torments to an extent worse 
perhaps than even the hunger, or the half- 
feeding, which the poor have to fight against. 
Nobody likes to be called a glutton or a gour- 
mand, yet the ordinary dinner-giver or diner- 



OUR OFTEN INFIRMITIES. 65 

out of the present day will find considerable 
difficulty in preventing himself from becoming 
a little of both. 

Now, a good dinner is an excellent thing. A 
really elegant dinner, well cooked, well served, 
with tasteful accompaniments of every kind, and 
with a moderate number of pleasant people 
to enjoy it, is a most delightful thing. It is 
right that those who can afford it should give 
such, replete with " every delicacy of the sea- 
son ; " the best food, the best wine, the most 
artistic and beautiful table arrangements, and 
in sufficient quantity fully to satisfy the guests. 
Sufficient time also should be allowed fairly 
to enjoy the meal ; taking it leisurely, and 
seasoning it with that cheerful conversation 
which is said to help digestion. In truth, there 
cannot be a pleasanter sight than an honest, 
honourable man, at the head of his own hospi- 
table board, looking down two lines of happy- 
looking friends, whom he is sincerely glad 
to welcome, and who are glad in return to 
give him, according to the stereotyped phrase, 
"the pleasure of their company," which really 

F 



66 OUR OFTEN INFIRMITIES. 

is a pleasure, and without which the grandest 
banquets are weariness inexpressible. But the 
dinner should be subservient to the guests, 
not the guests to the dinner; and every meal, 
be it simple or splendid, is worthless altogether 
unless eaten, as a good Christian has it, "in 
gladness and singleness of heart." Such a meal, 
taken among friends and neighbours, with the 
faces of those you love, or like, or even only 
admire, gathered round you, not too many of 
them, nor for too long a time, and moving early 
into the drawing-room, to pass a social evening 
in conversation or music, — such a feast is truly a 
feast ; the ideal dinner-party, which does no harm 
to any one, and to many a great deal of good. 

But the ordinary " dinner-party " is, eighteen 
or twenty people chosen at random without 
any regard to their suiting one another, sitting 
down to eat and drink without intermission 
for from two to three hours, say from half-past 
seven or eight till nearly ten. A "feed" lasting 
so long that however small may be the bits 
you put into the unhappy stomach, it is kept 
working on at the process of digestion till its 






OUR OFTEN INFIRMITIES. 67 

powers are thoroughly exhausted. And, eating- 
over, drinking begins. 

I beg pardon, nobody ever " drinks " nowa- 
days. And, of course, nobody is so vulgar as to 
over-eat himself. That enormity is left to the 
workhouse boy over his Christmas plum-pudr- 
ding, or the charity girl at a school tea. Never- 
theless, one sometimes sees, even in elegant 
drawing-rooms, gentlemen enter with fishy eyes, 
and talk, not too brilliantly, to ladies with 
flushed cheeks and weary smiles. Sometimes 
one would like to whisper, " My dear friends,, 
you don't know it ; but have you not both eaten 
and drunk a little more than was good for 
you ? You would have felt much better and 
happier after a simple, short dinner, which 
— instead of the fifteen minutes that you stand 
sipping your tea, and wondering if your 
carriage is come — left you an hour or two to 
spend a pleasant, sociable evening. Has it 
been pleasant ? Have you really enjoyed your- 
self ? How do you feel after it ? And how do 
you think you will feel to-morrow morning ? ''' 

Ah, that to-morrow morning ! especially to 



68 OUR OFTEN INFIRMITIES. 

those who have to work with their brains, and 
in London, apart from the wholesome country 
life, which neutralises so many evils. " I can't 
dine out," has said to me more than one learned 
or literary man, or agreeable "homme de 
societe," whom dinner-givers would give the 
world to get. " It is absolute death to me — or 
dyspepsia, which is only a slow death to all one's 
faculties, and perhaps one's moral nature too, 
for your dyspeptic is usually the most ill-tem- 
pered and disagreeable fellow going. And 
yet I am neither a glutton nor a wine-bibber. 
I like a good dinner, and I like to eat it in 
company with my fellow-creatures. But, accord- 
ing to the present system of dinner-parties, I 
can't do it without absolute injury to myself; 
hindering my work, affecting my health, and 
bringing on all sorts of infirmities, that a man 
likes to steer clear of as long as he can." 

Yes, if he has the strength of will to do it. 
But not every man has, or woman either. Few 
people practise that golden rule of health, I 
think it was Luigi Cornaro's, "Always rise 
from table feeling that you could take a little 



OUR OFTEN INFIRMITIES. 69 

bit more." Yet if we did practise it, with an- 
other very simple rule, to eat always regularly, 
at the same hour, and, as nearly as possible, the 
same quantity of food — not doubling the quan- 
tity because it happens to be " nice," — we should 
soon lessen amazingly our often infirmities. 

Prevention is better than cure, and in most 
small ailments there cannot be a safer physic 
than abstinence. Abstinence from over-food, 
over-work. How persistently we shut our eyes 
to the beginnings of disease, beginnings so 
trifling that we hardly notice them, until they 
end in that premature decay which seems now 
only too common amongst our best and greatest 
men, and those whom the world can least spare. 
People rush to doctors to cure them ; they never 
think of curing themselves, by putting a stop 
to the exciting causes of ill-health. As a wise 
old woman said to a very foolish young one, 
who brought her a heap of feeble MSS. to look 
over and try to sell, on the pitiful plea that 
she must have money, in order to pay for her 
medicine and her wine, " My dear, stop the 
wine and stop the medicine, and then you will 



70 OUR OFTEN INFIRMITIES. 

be able to stop the writing also, which will be 
much the better for both yourself and the public." 

The selfishness of people who will not stop, 
who go on indulging their luxurious, careless, 
or studious habits until they make themselves 
confirmed invalids, an anxiety and a torment to 
those about them, cannot be too strongly repro- 
bated. Ay, even though it takes the form of 
a noble indifference to self, in pursuit of know- 
ledge, wealth, ambition ; any of the pretty dis- 
guises in which we wrap up the thing we like 
to do, and make believe to other people, often 
almost to ourselves, that it is the very thing 
we ought to do. 

And here I must dwell a moment on a case 
in point, the right and wrong of which is some- 
times exceedingly difficult to define — how far it 
is allowable to run risks of infectious diseases. 

Formerly, very good people regarded plague 
and pestilence as coming direct from the hand 
of God, which it was useless, nay, worse, irre- 
ligious, to fight against. I have heard sensible 
and excellent persons say calmly, as a reason for 
going, quite unnecessarily, into a fever-stricken 



OUR OFTEN INFIRMITIES. 71 

house, " Oh, I am not afraid : if it is the will of 
the Lord for me to catch it, I shall catch it ; if 
not, I am safe." 

Most true ; in fact the merest truism, like 
pious folks' habit of writing D.V., Deo volente, 
about anything they intend to do, as if they 
could possibly do it without the will of God ! 
But is it the will of God that infection should 
be spread from house to house by these well- 
meaning individuals, who may indeed escape 
themselves, but can never tell how much misery 
they are bringing on other people ? 

Modern science has found out that, like many 
other physical woes, epidemic or contagious 
diseases are principally owing to ourselves, our 
own errors or carelessnesses, not the will of God 
at all ; that He has provided certain antidotes 
or remedies against them, and those who ne- 
glect or refuse these lay themselves under the 
lash of His righteous punishments, nor can they 
complain of any suffering that follows. 

Infectious diseases may be almost always 
put under the category of preventible evils, and 
it is the duty of all truly religious persons to 



72 OUR OFTEN INFIRMITIES. 

help the Almighty, so to speak, that is to make 
themselves His instruments in stamping out evil 
wherever they find it. Ay, even though it may 
be after His own mysterious way, as we some- 
times see it, or fancy we do, of sacrificing the 
few to the many. 

Disease must "be stamped out, and its circle of 
misery narrowed as much as possible, even at 
cost of individual feeling. The primary thought 
of every person attacked by an infectious illness 
ought to be, " Let me harm as few people as I 
can." There is something particularly heroic 
in the story of the East-end clergyman, who, 
discovering that he had caught small-pox, 
resolutely refused to go home, would not even 
enter a cab which was brought to take him to 
the hospital, but, hailing a hearse passing by, 
crept into that, and so was carried safely to the 
safe hospital-door. 

He was a noble instance, this man, of that 
prudence which is compatible with the utmost 
courage, the deepest self-devotion ; that benevo- 
lent caution which sees other people's rights as 
clearly as its own. How different from a certain 









OUR OFTEN INFIRMITIES. 73 

affectionate mother, who, when another mother 
hesitated to enter a railway carriage full of chil- 
dren because her little boy was recovering from 
measles, answered, " Oh, how kind of you to tell 
me ! for my little folks here have only just got 
through scarlet fever, and suppose they had 
caught measles on the top of that ? " But it 
never occurred to her to prevent somebody 
else's little boy from catching scarlet fever on 
the top of measles. 

Absolute justice, beyond even sympathy, and 
far beyond sentimental feeling of any kind, 
should be the rule of all who have to do with 
infection ; their one prominent thought how to 
narrow its fatal work within the smallest pos- 
sible bounds. Doctors, nurses, and those friends 
and relations who are naturally in charge of 
the sick, must take their lives in their hands, 
do their duty, and trust God for the rest. And 
happily there is seldom any lack of such ; brave 
physicians, who, having voluntarily entered a 
profession which involves so much risk to them 
and theirs, carry it out unflinchingly ; nurses, 
who to their own people or to strangers, for 



7+ OUR OFTEN INFIRMITIES. 

love or for charity, which means for God, devote 
themselves open-eyed to a righteous self-sacri- 
fice. But there it should end. Every one who 
heedlessly or unnecessarily, for bravado or 
thoughtlessness, or even from mistaken pious 
zeal, goes in the way of infection, or helps in the 
spread of it, commits a crime against society, 
which society cannot too strongly protect itself 
from. 

When I see rabid religionists carrying hand- 
fuls of tracts into reeking, typhus-doomed cot- 
tages, where they ought first to have carried 
food and clothes, or, better still, have levelled 
them with the ground and built up in their 
stead wholesome dwellings ; when I hear 
clergymen with young families, and going 
daily into other families and schools, protest 
that it is " their duty " to enter infected houses 
in order to administer spiritual consolation to 
people dying of small-pox or scarlet fever ; I 
look upon them much as I would upon a man 
who thought it "his duty" to carry a lighted 
candle into a coal-mine. Nothing may happen ; 
but if anything does happen, what of him who 



OUR OFTEN INFIRMITIES. 75 

caused the disaster by his fatal folly — misnamed 
faith ? As if " salvation " did not mean a saving 
from sin rather than from punishment ; and, 
therefore, though men's souls may be in our hands 
during life, they must be left solely in God's 
when death comes — and after. These so-called 
religious persons are apparently much more 
bent upon doing their own will in their own 
way than the Master's in His way. For the 
will of God, so far as we can trace it through 
His manifestation of himself in His Son, seems 
to be the prevention and cure of not only moral 
but physical evil by every possible means, prior 
to its total extinction. 

Either Christ's doctrine is true or it is not ; but 
even those who aver that it is not true often mourn- 
fully acknowledge that it ought to be — that we 
should be better if it were true. And He did not 
despise the body. He held it to be the " temple 
of the Holy Spirit." Asceticism was as far from 
Him as was luxurious living. He went about, not 
only teaching but doing good — practical good. 
Before He attempted to preach to the multitude, 
He fed them, remembering that " divers of them 



7 6 OUR OFTEN INFIRMITIES. 






came from far." When He raised from the dead 
J aims' daughter, He "commanded that some- 
thing should be given her to eat." And in 
revisiting His forlorn disciples His first tender 
words were, " Children, have ye any meat V In 
no way, from beginning to end of His ministry, 
does He disregard or despise those bodily infir- 
mities which we may conclude He shared, though 
how much or how little we never can know. 

One fact, however, is noteworthy : He never 
complained of them. At least, the only record 
we have of any murmur from His lips was made 
solely to His Father : — " Let this cup pass from 
me " — followed quickly by the acceptation of it — 
" Not my will, but Thine be done." A lesson to 
us, who are so prone to grumble over the most 
trifling of our infirmities, the least of our aches 
and pains ; so ready to blame everybody for 
them, except ourselves ; to rush for cure to 
every doctor we hear of, instead of trusting to 
our own common-sense, self-restraint, and, 
when all else fails, that quiet patience which at 
least never inflicts its own sufferings upon its 
neighbours. 



OUR OFTEN INFIRMITIES. 77 

Christ did not — not to the very end. When 
dying the most torturing of deaths, it was His 
mother and His brethren that He thought of, not 
Himself. And so it is with many a sick and 
dying person, who in life has been a humble 
follower of Him. 

Strange, how in these sermons, professedly 
" out of Church " — holding up the banner of no 
set creed — appealing especially to those who say 
they believe none, and refuse to accept any fore- 
gone conclusions, or take anything granted in 
the " science of theology " so called — as if any 
finite being could learn the Infinite as he learns 
astronomy or mathematics ! — it is strange, I say, 
how continually I find myself recurring to Christ 
and His teaching, which — whatever be the facts 
or misrepresentations of His personal history — - 
shines out clearly after the mists of nearly nine- 
teen hundred years as the only perfect righteous- 
ness the world ever saw ; a standard which, 
consciously or unconsciously, all righteous souls 
instinctively recognise. 

It is easy for people to say they do not believe 
in Christianity — that is, in its corruptions ; but 



78 OUR OFTEN INFIRMITIES. 

the spirit of it has so permeated our modern world 
that many a fierce sceptic is a good Christian 
without knowing it. He can deny, but he can- 
not get away from, the influence of that divine 
morality which Christians recognise as their Sun 
of Righteousness. It may not shine ; mists may 
obscure it, so that one is prone to doubt its very 
existence ; but, without it, daylight would not 
be there. 

I am wandering a little from my subject, and 
yet not far ; since what comfort is there, except 
in such thoughts as these, when the dark time 
comes which must come to us all — when our in- 
firmities are not " often," but continual ? How 
shall we bear them ? How shall we meet that 
heavy season, when — as, I lately heard one lady 
answer to another who was saying she felt 
better than she had done for years — "Ah, my 
dear, but / shall never feel better any more " ? 

Not very wonderful, considering the sufferer 
was seventy-six ; yet she evidently felt it a great 
hardship, a cruel wrong. Even then she could not 
reconcile herself to old age, to the gradual slip- 
ping off of the worn garment, meant tenderly, I 



OUR OFTEN INFIRMITIES. 79 

think, as nature's preparation for the putting of 
it off altogether, and being clothed afresh with 
something, we know not what, except that it 
will be altogether new. 

A hard time this to many ; when all the sins 
they ever committed against their bodies — and 
you may sin against your body just as fatally as 
you sin against your soul — rise up in judgment 
against them. The season, when we begin to 
feel that we are really growing old, and that 
everybody sees it, but is too polite to say so, or 
tries to gloss it under the unmeaning remark, 
" How young you look ! " — indicating that we 
cannot reasonably be expected to look young 
any longer. This is as painful a phase as any 
our life goes through — more painful, I think, 
than absolute old age, which gradually becomes 
as conceited over its many years as youth is 
over its few ones. 

Still, I cannot believe but that it is possible, 
by extra care at the beginning of decay, to avoid 
its saddest infirmities, and to make senility 
a comparatively painless thing — free from many 
of those weaknesses and unpleasantnesses which 



8o OUR OFTEN INFIRMITIES. 

cause so many unselfish people to say honestly 
they never wish to live to be old. 

For instance, how few recognise the very 
simple and obvious truth, that as the machinery 
of digestion begins to wear out, it is advisable 
to give it some little less work to do. A 
meal from which a young man would rise up 
hungry, is quite sufficient for the needs of a man 
of seventy, and better for him than more. The 
healthiest, most active, and most happy-minded 
of old people I have always found to be those 
who were exceedingly moderate in their food ; 
eating less and less every year, instead of, accord- 
ing to the common fallacy, more and more. And 
they who have longest retained their hold on life 
and its enjoyments, have been those who in all 
their habits have gradually gone back to the 
simplicity of childhood. Indeed, it seems as if 
nature, when we do not foolishly resist her 
or interfere with her, would fain bring us back 
quietly to all the tastes, pleasures, and wants of 
our earliest youth — its innocent interests, its 
entire but not necessarily painful or humiliating 
dependence ; would give us, in short, a little 






OUR OFTEN INFIRMITIES. 8t 

tender rock in our second cradle before she lays 
us in the grave. 

And this,, if we could only see it, is good for 
us, and equally good for those that have to do 
it for us. It is well for the younger generation to 
see how contentedly we can loose our hold upon 
that world which is slowly sliding from us.- 
Though, unlike them, we can no longer work all 
day and dance all night ; though we require every 
year more care, more regularity of hours and 
meals, more sleep — at all events more rest ; can 
by no means play tricks with ourselves, for any 
excuse either of amusement or labour ; are 
perhaps obliged to spend one half the day in. 
peaceful seclusion, or equally peaceful endur- 
ance of pain, in order to qualify ourselves for 
being cheerful with those we love for the other 
half; — still life is not yet a burden to us, and we 
try to be as little of a burden as possible to 
those about us. We have had our day ; we will 
not grudge them theirs. 

I cannot imagine an old age like this to be a 
sad or undesirable thing. Infirmities it may 
have — must have ; but they need not be over- 

G 



82 OUR OFTEN INFIRMITIES. 

whelming ; if the failing body has been treated, 
and is still treated, with that amount of respect 
which is its due. And at worst, perhaps bodily 
sufferings are not harder to bear than the hor- 
rible mental struggles of youth, with its selfish 
agony of passion and pain ; or than the vicarious 
sufferings of middle age, when we groaned under 
the weight of other people's cares, mourned over 
sorrows that we were utterly powerless to cure, 
and looked forward with endless anxiety into 
an uncertain future, net considering how soon it 
would become the harmless past. 

Now all that is over. The old never grieve 
much; at least, not over much. Why should 
they ? It is strange to notice how, even after a 
loss by death that a few years before would 
have utterly crushed them, they seem to rise up 
and go on their way — only a few steps more — ■ 
quietly, even cheerfully ; troubling no one, com- 
plaining to no one, probably because it is only a 
few steps more. Suffering itself grows calm in 
the near view of rest. 

Thus it is with people of restful and patient 
mind. For others there is still something left. "I 






OUR OFTEN INFIRMITIES. 83 

have had all I wanted," said to me one of the most 
unquiet spirits I ever knew, keenly alive still, 
even under the deadness of seventy odd years. 
" Life has been a long puzzle to me, but I am 
coming to the end of it now. There is one thing 
more : I want to find out the great secret, and I 
shall ; before long." 

One can quite well imagine some people, to 
whom the after life was neither a certainty nor 
even a hope, looking forward to death as a 
matter of at least curiosity. But for us, who 
believe that death is the gate of life, it is quite a 
different feeling. Putting it on the very lowest 
ground, to have all our curiosity gratified, to 
know even as we are known, to feel nearer and 
nearer to our hands the key of the eternal 
mystery, the satisfying of the infinite desire, — 
this alone is consolation, in degree, for our own 
failing powers and flagging spirits ; nay even 
for the slowly emptying world around us — 
emptying of the wise and the good, the pleasant 
and the dear, whom one by one we see passing 
" ad maj'ores." 

" If I could only get rid of my body I should 



84 OUR OFTEN INFIRMITIES. 

be all right," sighed once a great sufferer. And 
there are times when even the most patient of 
us feel rather glad that we do not live for 
ever. Respect our mortal tabernacle as we may, 
and treat it tenderly, as we ought to do, we 
may one day be not so very sorry to lay it down, 
not only with all its sins, but with its often 
infirmities. 



&nmon BEE 

HOW TO TRAIN UP A PARENT IN 
THE WAY HE SHOULD GO. 






III. 



HOW TO, TRAIN UP A PARENT IN THE WAY HE 

SHOULD GO. 

" f~\ H dear ! I'm afraid I shall never manage 
to bring up my mother properly," was 
the remark once made by a rather fast young 
lady, to whom the old-fashioned institution of 
" mothers " was no doubt a rather inconvenient 
thing. 

" My friend," said an old Quaker to a lady 
who contemplated adopting a child, " I know 
not how far thou wilt succeed in educating her, 
but I am quite certain she will educate thee." 

Often when I look round on the world of 
parents and children, I think of those two con- 
tradictory speeches, and of the truth that lies 
between both. 

The sentiment may be very heretical, but I 



•88 



BOW TO TRAIN UP A PARENT 



have often wondered how many out of the thou- 
sands of children born annually in our England 
alone, come to parents who at all deserve the 
blessing ? Not one-half, certainly — even among 
the mothers. Halve that again, and I believe 
you will come to the right per-centage as re- 
gards the fathers. 

It is sometimes said that children of the pre- 
sent day are made too much of. Perhaps so. 
They but follow the fashion of the age — any- 
thing but a heroic or ascetic age. No doubt 
they are a little " spoiled." So are we all. But 
the errors of the parents, from which theirs arise, 
are a much more serious matter. How to train 
up the parents in the way they should go, is a 
necessity which, did it force itself upon the mind 
of any school board, would be found quite as 
important as the education of the children. 

When we think of them, poor helpless little 
creatures ! who never asked to be born, who from 
birth upwards are so utterly dependent upon the 
two other creatures to whom they owe their 
existence — a debt for which it is supposed they 
can never be sufficiently grateful — do not our 



IN THE WAY HE SHOULD GO. 89 

hearts yearn over them with pity, or grow hot 
with indignation ? This even without need of 
such stories as we are continually hearing — I 
take three at random from to-day's newspaper — 
of the drunken father who amused himself with 
dashing his three-years- old child against the 
table till he accidentally dashed out its brains ; 
of the woman who thrice in one afternoon tried 
to drop her baby among the horses and car- 
riages in High Holborn ; of the boy of four and 
a half flogged almost to death by a school-board 
teacher for not doing his sums and not answer- 
ing when spoken to ; which case the magistrate 
— doubtless himself a father — curtly dismissed, 
saying, "If discipline were not to be main- 
tained, what was the education of boys to come 
to ?" 

However, putting aside these public facts, let 
us come upon our own private experience, and 
ask ourselves honestly, how many people we 
know who are — or are likely to prove — really good 
fathers and mothers ? wise, patient, judicious ; 
firm^ watchful, careful, and loving ? Above all 
things, just ; since, so deeply is implanted in the 



9 o HOW TO TRAIN UP A PARENT 



- 

Iff 






infant mind this heavenly instinct, that if I were 
asked what was most important in the bringing 
up of a child, love or justice, I think I should 
say justice. 

To be just is the very first lesson that a parent 
requires to learn. The rights of the little soul, 
which did not come into the world of its own 
accord, nor indeed was taken into consideration 
in the matter at all — for do any in marrying ever 
think of the sort of fathers or mothers they are 
giving to their offspring ? — the rights of this 
offspring, physical, mental, and moral, are at 
once most obvious and least regarded. The 
new-born child is an interest, a delight, a pride ; 
the parents exult over it, as over any other 
luxury or amusement; but how seldom do they 
take to heart the solemn responsibility of it, or 
see a face divine, as it were, looking out at them 
from the innocent baby-face, with the warning 
of Christ Himself — " Whosoever shall offend one 
of these little ones, it were better for him that a 
mill-stone were hung about his neck, and that 
he were cast into the sea." 

There could hardly be a stronger expression 



IN THE WAY HE SHOULD GO, 91 

of the way in which God — the Christian God — 
views the relation between parents and children. 
Yet most young parents, who until now have 
been accustomed to think only of themselves or 
of one another, take the introduction of the 
unconscious third as their natural possession, 
never doubting that it is wholly theirs, to bring 
up as they please, and that they are quite 
capable of so doing. 

Constantly one hears the remark, "Oh ! I would 
not take the" responsibility of another person's 
child." Does that imply that they feel at liberty 
to do as they like with their own ? I fear it 
does ; and that law and custom both appear to 
sanction this delusion. Nobody must " interfere " 
between parent and child, at least not till the 
case comes within a degree or two of child- 
murder. The slow destruction of soul and body 
which, through ignorance or carelessness, goes 
on among hundreds of children, not only in 
humble, but in many respectable and well- 
regulated households, society never notices. I 
suppose even the most daring philanthropist 

uld never venture to bring in a bill for claiming 




92 HOW TO TRAIN UP A PARENT 



the children of unworthy parents, and snatch- 
ing them from ruin by annihilating all parental 



rights and making them children of the State. 
Yet such a proceeding would benefit the new 
generation to an incalculable degree. 

" Train up a child in the way he should go," 
is the advice in everybody's mouth, but who 
thinks of training the parents r Does not every- 
body strictly hold that the mere fact of pa- 
renthood implies all that is necessary for the 
upbringing of the child ? — all the love, all the 
wisdom, all the self-denial ? Does it ever occur 
to the average young man and young woman, 
bending together over the cradle of their first- 
born, that the little thing, whose teachers they 
are proudly constituting themselves to be, is 
much more likely to be the unconscious agent 
in teaching them ? 

And the education begins at once. How 
amusing, and, at the same time, how satisfac- 
tory it is, to see a young fellow, who throughout 
his bachelor days has been a selfish egotist — 
most young bachelors are — obliged now to think 
of something and somebody besides himself; to 






IN THE WAV HE SHOULD GO. 93 

give up not a few of his own personal comforts, 
and find himself forced to play second fiddle in 
his own home— '- where the one important object, 
for the time being, is " the baby." 

I have spoken of rights. This is the only 
instance I know in which they are not mutual, 
but entirely one-sided. The new-born babe 
owes absolutely nothing to the parents beyond 
the physical fact of existence. All moral claims 
are on its side alone. The parents are respon- 
sible for it, soul and body, for certainly the first 
twenty years ; nor, even after that, is it easy to 
imagine circumstances which could wholly set 
them free. The most sorely tried father and 
mother could hardly cast adrift their erring 
offspring, without a lurking uneasiness of con- 
science as to how far these errors were owing to 
themselves and their upbringing. For,, save in 
very rare cases, where far-back types crop out 
again, and are most difficult to deal with, there 
is seldom a u black sheep " in any family with- 
out the parents having been to blame. 

"Why, I brought up my children all alike," 
moans some virtuous progenitor of such. " How 



94 



HOW TO TRAIN UP A PARENT 



does it happen that this one has turned out so 
different from the rest ? " 

Just, my good friend, because you did bring 
them up all alike. You had not the sense to see 
that the same training which makes one mars 
another; or else that, in training them, it was 
necessary to train yourself first. Meaning to be 
a guide, you were only a finger-post, which 
points the way to others, but stands still itself. 

The very first lesson a parent has to learn is, 
that whatever he attempts to teach, he must 
himself first practise. Whatever he wishes his 
child to avoid, he must make up his mind to 
renounce ; and that from the very earliest 
stage of existence, and down to the minutest 
things. . In young children, the imitative faculty 
is so enormous, the reasoning power so small, 
that one cannot be too careful, even with infants, 
to guard against indulging in a harsh tone, a 
brusque manner, a sad or angry look. As far 
as is possible, the tender bud should live in an 
atmosphere of continual sunshine, under which 
it may safely and happily unfold, hour by hour, 
and day by day. To effect this there is required 









IN THE WAY HE SHOULD GO. 95 

from the parent, or those who stand in the 
parent's stead, an amount of self-control and 
self-denial which would be almost impossible, 
had not Heaven implanted on the one side 
maternal instinct, on the other that extraordi- 
nary winning charm which there is about all 
young creatures, making us put up with their 
endless waywardness, and love them all the 
better the more trouble they give us. 

That is — mothers do. When I said " maternal 
instinct," I spoke advisedly and intentionally. 
Of paternal instinct there is almost none. A 
man is proud of his sons and daughters because 
they are his sons and daughters — bound to carry 
down his name to posterity ; but he rarely takes 
the slightest interest in anybody else's children, 
and in his own only so far as they contribute 
to his pleasure, amusement, or dignity. The 
passionate love a woman often has for an- 
other woman's children, and for the feeblest, 
naughtiest, ugliest of her own, is to men a 
thing entirely unknown. Two-thirds of paternal 
love is pure pride, and the remaining third, not 
seldorm pure egotism. 



96 HOW TO TRAIN UP A PARENT 

Therefore,, for the first seven, nay ten years 
of a child's life, it should in most cases be left as 
much as possible to the care of women. Not 
that every woman has the motherly heart ; but 
the fatherly heart is a rarer thing still. 

Besides, men's work in the world naturally 
unfits them for the management of children. It 
is very hard for a man, who has been worried 
in business all day long, to come home and be 
pestered by a crying child ; even though the 
poor innocent cannot help itself — is probably 
only tired, or sick, or hungry. But the father 
will not see this ; he will only see that the 
child annoys himself, and must therefore be 
" naughty." 

" And when naughty, of course it must be 
punished," I heard a middle-aged father once 
say with virtuous complacency.- "My boy is 
only eleven months old — yet I assure you I 
have whipped him three times." 

Whipped him three times ! And the mother 
allowed it, — the young mother who sat smiling 
and beautifully dressed at the head of the table. 
Why had she not the sense to lock her nursery 












IN THE WAY HE SHOULD GO. 97 

door against the brutal fool r But what is the 
good of calling names ? the man was simply- 
ignorant. For all his grand assumption of pa- 
rental authority, he had not the wit to see that 
for the first year, perhaps two years of our life, 
there can be no such thing as moral " naughti- 
ness." Existence is so purely physical that if 
we only take care of the little body, the mind 
will take care of itself; or, at worst, it is so 
completely a piece of white paper, that it will 
show nothing save what we write upon it. Any- 
body who has had much to do with young 
children must acknowledge that, in spite of 
the doctrine of original sin, nearly every 
childish fault is a reflected fault, the copy of 
something seen in other people. If any one will 
take the trouble to notice his own faults or 
peculiarities — which we are all rather slow to 
do — it may account for a good many " naughti- 
nesses" which he punishes in his offspring. 

It is often strange and sad to see how hard 
grown-up people — especially men — are upon 
children : expecting from five — or say ten years 
old — an amount of patience, diligence, self- 

H 



9 8 



HOW TO TRAIN UP A PARENT 



control and self-denial which they themselves, at 
fifty odd, have never succeeded in attaining to. 
But I repeat, so few men are by temperament, 
circumstances, or habits in the least fitted for 
the management of children, that the advice I 
give to all sensible wives and capable mothers 
concerning their little ones, is this — " Save their 
fathers from them, and save them from their 
fathers/' 

Not but that there are fathers true and tender, 
firm as a man ought to be, unselfish and patient 
as, happily, most women are ; to whose breast 
the youngest child runs to in any trouble, " Oh, 
it's always papa who comforts us," and of whom 
the elder ones say fondly, " We mind one look 
of papa's more than twenty scoldings." But 
such are the exceptions. The average of men 
and fathers are, I solemnly believe, quite un- 
fitted, both by nature or habit, for the upbring- 
ing of children. Thus, necessarily the duty 
falls on the mother. And why not ? What 
higher destiny ? 

There is a class of women who consider that 
they have a higher destiny ; that to help in 



IN THE WAY HE SHOULD GO. 99 

the larger work of the world, to continue their 
own mental culture, is far more important than 
to bring up the next generation worthily. 

Both duties are excellent in their way; but 
there are plenty of unmarried childless women, 
and women with no domestic instincts, to do 
the former : mothers alone can do the latter. 
True, it exacts the devotion of the entire life ; 
a real mother has no time for gay society, nor 
intellectual development, except such as she is 
always gaining through her children ; she must 
make up her mind to the fact that they and her 
husband compose her world, and fill up her life. 

And what better world ? what nobler life ? 
Even if she is worn out, " like a rose-tree in full 
bearing," and drops off when her destiny is 
done. No matter, she has fulfilled it, and she is 
and she will be blessed. 

Not, however, unless she has thoroughly ful- 
filled it. The mere fact of bringing eight or ten 
children into the world does not in the least 
imply true motherhood. If she leaves them to 
nurses and governesses ; if she shirks any of 
the anxious cares, perpetual small worries, and 



ioo HOW TO TRAIN UP A PARENT 

endless self-abnegations which are her natural 
portion, the under-side to her infinite blessings, 
she does not deserve these last. Not every 
mother is born with the mother's heart : I have 
known many an old maid who had it, and I 
have heard of mothers of many children who 
owned to " hating " every child as it came, and 
only learning to love the. helpless innocent from 
a sense of duty. But duty often teaches love, 
and responsibility produces the capacity for it. 
Many a light-minded, light-hearted girl, who 
has danced and flirted and sentimentalised 
through her happy spring-time, finds the sweet 
compulsion of nature too strong for her : very 
soon she forgets all her follies, and settles down 
into a real mother, whom love instructs in all 
things necessary ; who shrinks from no trouble, 
is equal to all duties ; is to her children nurse, 
companion, playfellow, as well as doctress, 
sempstress, teacher, friend. Everything, in short. 
The father may be more or less to the child, 
as his occupation and his own peculiarities 
allow ; but the mother must be all in all, or God 
help the children ! 



IN THE WAY HE SHOULD GO. 101 

Granting that the mother-love is there, is 
love sufficient ? Not always. It will not make 
up for the lack of common sense, self-control, 
accurate and orderly ways ; 

" The reason firm, the temperate will ; 
Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill." 

Nor does the mere fact of parenthood by a sort 
of divine right constitute all parents infal- 
lible, as they are so apt to suppose, and 
by their conduct expect their children to be- 
lieve it. 

The child will not believe it, not after the very 
first, unless the parent proves it; and this 
by something stronger than bare assertion or 
natural instinct. It may be a dangerous thing 
to suggest, but I am afraid the idea of some 
mysterious instinctive bond between parent and 
child is a mere superstition. No doubt the feel- 
ing is there, but it may be exercised equally with 
or without the tie of blood. Suppose, unknown 
to these tender young parents, another infant, a 
" changeling child," were to be secretly popped 
into the cradle over which they bend so fondly ? 
They would feel towards it exactly the same 



io2 HOW TO TRAIN UP A PARENT 



sensations. Also, if any aunt, grandmother, 
or even ordinary stranger should fulfil towards 
that child all the duties of a parent, the love 
won, and deserved, would be a true filial 
affection. The instinct of blood, as people call 
it, acts admirably as a cement to other ties ; 
but of itself, save in poetical fancy, it has no 
existence whatever. Nothing but the wildest 
imagination could have made George Eliot's 
" Spanish Gipsy," tenderly reared and betrothed 
to the man she loved, elope at once with her 
Zingaro father, whom she had never seen in 
her life before. And nothing but the most ex- 
traordinary moral twist could make people 
condemn, as I have heard condemned, Silas 
Marner's beloved Eppie, because, placed be- 
tween her adopted father, to whom she owed 
everything, and her flesh-and-blood father, to 
whom she owed nothing but her birth, she never 
hesitated in choosing the former. 

A parent, unlike a poet, is not born, he is 
made. There are certain things which he has 
at once to learn, or he will have no more in- 
fluence over his child than if he were a common 



IN THE WAY HE SHOULD GO. 103 

stranger. First, he must institute between 
himself and his child that which is as import- 
ant between child and parent as between man 
and God — the sense, not of absolute obedience, 
as is so often preached, but of absolute reliance, 
which produces obedience. To gain obedience, 
you must first set yourself to deserve it. What- 
ever you promise your little one, however small 
the thing may seem to you, and whatever trouble 
it costs you, perform it. Never let the doubt 
once enter that innocent mind, that you say 
what you do not mean, or will not act up to 
what you say. Make as few prohibitory laws 
as you possibly can, but once made, keep to 
them. In what is granted, as in what is denied, 
compel yourself, however weary, or worried, or 
impatient, to administer always even-handed 
justice. "Fiat justitia, ruat caelum," is a sys- 
tem much more likely to secure your child's real 
affection than all the petting and humouring so 
generally indulged in, to give pleasure or save 
trouble, not to your little ones, but to yourself. 

A very wise woman once consoled an over- 
tender mother, who was being blamed for 



io 4 HOW TO TRAIN UP A PARENT 

" spoiling " her little girl, " Never mind. Love 
never spoiled any child. It is the alternations, 
the kiss on the one cheek and the blow on the 
other, which ruin." 

And this is what I often notice in ex- 
tremely well-meaning parents ; their love is 
not a steady love, but continually 

" Roughened by those cataracts and breaks, 
"Which humour interposed too often makes." 

They cannot keep that sweet, level calm which 
above all things is necessary for the govern- 
ment of children. The same playful wiles 
which amuse one day, irritate the next. Not 
that the child is different, but they are in a 
different mood themselves, which important fact 
the poor little thing is expected at once to 
recognise, and act accordingly. 

And here the second great mistake is made. 
We expect too much from our children. We 
exact from them a perfection which we are far 
from carrying out in ourselves ; we require of 
them sacrifices much heavier, comparatively, 
than those of any grown-up person. And they 
soon find out that. A child's eyes are very sharp. 



IN THE WAY HE SHOULD GO. 105 

Any flaw in one's argument, any lapse in one's 
conduct, is caught up by them and reproduced 
with alarming accuracy. 

" Mr. A. ; is that the Mr. A. whom papa dis- 
likes so ?" said an innocent " enfant terrible " 
before a whole dinner-table. And papa, who 
had let his prejudices run away with him, so as 
to speak a great deal more strongly than he 
meant of harmless Mr. A., felt that after this 
there would be some difficulty in teaching his 
child to obey the ninth commandment and bear 
no false witness against its neighbour. 

The intense truthfulness and straight-for- 
wardness of children, when not crushed by 
fear, or corrupted by precocious deceit, is a per- 
petual lesson to elder people, who have learnt 
to disguise their feelings ; as, I suppose, we all 
must, in degree. 

"Mamma, I don't like that gentleman ; when is 
he going away?" observed the same painfully 
candid child, concerning a morning visitor, who 
had the grace to say politely, " My dear, I am 
going away directly," and disappear. But then 
it was necessary to take the matter in hand. 



io6 HOW TO TRAIN UP A PARENT 



And never, perhaps, did the mother feel so 
strongly that courtesy is a Christian virtue, and 
Christian charity the basis of all good-breeding, 
than when she had to explain to her little 
daughter that it was not "kind" to make such 
a remark ; that whether we like people or not, 
whether they are agreeable or disagreeable, we 
are equally bound to show them civility, since by 
incivility we disgrace not them, but ourselves. 
And this without advocating any insincerity, 
or hypocrisy, or even " company manners," 
which no child is ever likely to assume, except 
in imitation of its elders. 

To be perfectly true, perfectly just, perfectly 
loving to our children, is the only way of teach- 
ing them to be the same to other people. The 
very tone of voice, the turn of phrase, the trick 
of manner of their elders and (so-called) su- 
periors are often imitated by them with such 
a frightful accuracy that it is necessary to be 
continually on our guard. One sees one's 
own reflection in these awful little people as 
startlingly as if one were living in a room of 
looking-glasses. And therein lies the continual 



IN THE WAY HE SHOULD GO. 107 

education which, whether or not the parent 
gives to the child, the child unconsciously gives 
to the parent. Happy he who is clear-sighted 
enough to read the lesson, and wise enough to 
profit thereby. 

On this head let me suggest, that if the 
children miss much, the parents miss more, by 
the fashion — exacted, I suppose, by the ever- 
growing luxuriousness of our middle classes — 
of keeping children so much in the nursery, 
and under an array of nursemaids. Yet I have 
heard very sensible mothers advocate this ; 
declaring that it " rests " the little brain to 
be left to the company of servants. 

Our neighbours across the Channel think 
differently. In French domestic life — provincial 
life, for France is even more distinct from Paris 
than England from London — in that cheerful, 
affectionate, happy home life which is, I believe, 
far commoner with them than with us, one of 
the brightest and most wholesome elements is 
the children. They have no nursery, and, after 
the very earliest infancy, they have no bonne. 
The little people are always with the big people 



io8 



HOW TO TRAIN UP A PARENT 



— father and mother, grandfather and grand 
mother — for the French household is often made 
up of several generations. As soon as they can 
sit at table, they take their place there ; in the 
salon they are as welcome as in the salle-a- 
manger ; and thus, unconsciously brought into 
training by the good manners of those about 
them, they learn to be little ladies and gentle- 
men almost before they can speak. 

"But," I have heard people argue, "how can 
you possibly have children always beside you ? 
As babies you might, if you could put up with 
the trouble of them ; but when they grow older 
it would be so very awkward. For their own 
sakes even, you ought not to let them hear their 
elders' conversation." 

What an admission ! Does it occur to any of 
these arguers that, except in very rare and 
solemn instances, the talk which is unfit for the 
ears of children ought never to be talked at all ? 
For what does it usually consist of r Criticizing 
one's neighbours ; sneering at one's friends ; 
ridiculing behind their backs those whom we 
praise to their faces ; telling secrets which 



IN THE WAY HE SHOULD GO. 109 

ought never to be told ; making bitter, or 
equivocal, or ill-natured remarks, which we 
are afraid to hear repeated. If so, to keep 
our children always in the room would be a 
very wholesome discipline, making us much 
better folks than some of us are now. 

Not that I by any means wish to take a 
sentimental or picturesque view of the rising 
generation. It is often a very aggravating 
generation indeed. Without any actual naugh- 
tiness, the restlessness which is natural to a 
child — indeed, a portion of its daily growth — is 
most trying to elder people, who have come to 
feel the intense blessedness of mere rest. And 
when it becomes worse than recklessness — 
actual wilfulness and mischievousness — even 
the strongest opponents, theoretically, of cor- 
poral chastisement, will at times feel their 
fingers tingling with an irresistible inclination 
to box their darling's ears. 

The more reason, therefore, that they should 
restrain themselves, and not do it. For punish- 
ment is not for the good of the punisher, but 
the punished ; and no punishment inflicted in a 



no HOW TO TRAIN UP A PARENT 



moment of irritation can ever be of the small- 
est good to either side. 

And this brings us to a widely discussed 
question ; — whether corporal punishment should 
ever be inflicted on children. For me, I answer 
decidedly, Never ! 

My reasons are these. To the very young — 
the eleven months' old infant, for instance — 
such a chastisement is simply brutal ; to a child 
old enough to understand the humiliation of it, 
a whipping can rarely do good, and may do 
incalculable harm. Besides, the degradation 
rests not alone with the child. A big creature 
beating a little one is always in a position very 
undignified, to say the least of it. Also, there 
is a certain difficulty in making the victim 
comprehend, that the same line of conduct 
which his parents exercise towards him is 
utterly forbidden him to exercise towards his 
younger brothers and sisters. 

It is possible, I grant, that there may be 
cases of actual moral turpitude — lying, theft, 
and the like — when nothing short of physical 
punishment will affect the culprit, and the 



IN THE WAY HE SHOULD GO. in 

parent has to stand forth as the stern adminis- 
trator of justice ; but it must be clearly shown 
to be justice, not revenge. I have known men 
so self-controlled, so tender, and withal so 
unswervingly just, that the inevitable whipping 
being inflicted, and submitted to, with a mourn- 
ful solemnity, the instant it was over the boy's 
arms were round the father's neck, and both 
wept together. But such cases are so excep- 
tional, that they cannot be taken as a guide. 
The ordinary rule is, that when a child is bad 
enough to deserve a whipping, the infliction of 
it will likely only harden him ; and if he does 
not deserve it, his whole nature will revolt in 
fury at the punishment. 

I shall never forget once seeing a small 
boy of ten, the inheritor of his father's violent 
temper, whom that father, for some trivial 
fault, seized and struck. The little fellow raised 
himself on tiptoe, and, doubling his small fist, 
with all his might and main struck back again. 
A proceeding which so astonished the father — 
who, like all tyrants, was rather a coward — that 
he shrank back, and retired from the field. He 



j 






ii2 HOW TO TRAIN UP A PARENT 

hated his boy ever after, but he never more 
attempted to thrash him. 

You will perceive I hold that, in the trainin 
of the young, example is everything, precept 
almost nothing. Half the good advice we give, 
certainly more than half of our scolding, just 
"goes in at one ear and out at the other." 
The continual reproach of, " You naughty 
child!" the seldom-fulfilled threat of, "I'll 
punish you ! " come in time to fall quite harm- 
less upon hardened ears. But a child to whom 
fear is absolutely unknown — as unknown as 
punishment — whose naughtiness is met solely 
by silence, feels this silence alone to be the 
most terrible retribution for ill-doing. The 
withdrawal of the parent's smile is to it like 
the hiding of God's face. " Oh, mamma, don't 
look so ! I can't bear it. It kills me ! " is 
the cry of such a child, falling on its bended 
knees in an agony of contrition and tears. 

It is not the preaching, not the teaching, not 
the continual worry of, " Don't do that ! " " Why 
didn't you do this ?" which makes children what 
we call " good " children ; that is, honest, truth- 






IN THE WAY HE SHOULD GO. 113 

ful, obedient ; troublesome, perhaps — all chil- 
dren are troublesome — but guilty of no mean- 
ness, deceitfulness, or wilful mischievousness. 
It is the constant living example of those they 
are with. They get into the habit of being 
"good," which makes this line of conduct so 
natural that they never think of any other. 

And here we come upon another moot ques- 
tion ; — whether or not there should be exacted 
from children blind obedience ? Sometimes, 
perhaps ; there may be cases where such is 
the only safety. But ordinarily speaking, 
while, as I have said, a child's first lesson 
should be trained into that implicit reliance 
on the parent which of necessity induces obe- 
dience, I think the parent ought to be exceed- 
ingly cautious how he exacts this obedience 
without giving a sufficient reason for it. At 
an incredibly early age the reasoning powers 
of a child can be developed, if the parent will 
take a little trouble to do it ; and how very- 
much trouble it saves afterwards he will soon 
find out. Three words of gentle explanation — 
"Don't do that, my child, because," &c, &c. 

I 



ir 4 HOW TO TRAIN UP A PARENT 

— will give him a stronger influence, a com- 
pleter authority, over the little mind than any 
harshly iterated, unexplained prohibitions. And 
the good of this works both ways ; while it 
gives the child confidence in the parent, it 
teaches the parent his most difficult part, to 
exercise authority without tyranny. That bar- 
baric dictum, "Do this, because I choose it," 
becomes softened into the Christian command, 
" Do this, because I wish it," or the still higher 
law, "because it is right." I have never yet 
known a child " naughty " enough deliberately 
to refuse to do a thing, when asked to do it 
simply on the ground " that it was right." 

This, again, leads us to a point upon which I 
think many, nay, most parents grievously err — 
the system of rewards and punishments. It is 
like bringing into innocent child-life that ter- 
rible creed which makes religion consist, not in 
the love of God, and the obeying Him because 
we love Him, but in finding out the best and 
easiest way to take care of ourselves — to keep 
out of hell and get into heaven. 

A principle which, put thus into plain English, 









IN THE WAV HE SHOULD GO. j 15 

we start at, yet whether or not believing in it 
ourselves, we practise it fatally with our children. 
" Do this, and I'll give you such and such a 
thing." "Dare to do that, and I will take from 
you so and so, which you delight in." A method 
which, like some forms of theology, may be con- 
venient and effective at the time, but which after- 
wards is most ruinous, inasmuch as it entirely 
abrogates that doctrine upon which I base the 
whole mutual training of parents and children 
— the doctrine of absolute right for right's sake. 

For how, if you have brought up young 
creatures on the principle of " Behave well, and 
you shall have a sweetie " — " Behave ill, and I'll 
whip you or send you to bed," can you follow 
it out by teaching your growing boy or girl to 
" eschew evil and do good " purely for the love 
of good and the hatred of evil ? How, above all, 
can you put into their hearts the love of God, 
when in after-life He hides His face in so many 
dark ways — when His teachings seem often so 
mysterious, nay, cruel — except by saying, " Love 
Him because He is perfect Love — adore Him, 
because He is absolute justice " ? 



n6 HOW TO TRAIN UP A PARENT 

Next to that justice, which is, I believe, a 
heavenly instinct with almost all young chil- 
dren, their strongest need, and the most 
powerful influence with them, is sympathy. 
And this the wise parent will give at all times 
and under all circumstances. A child accus- 
tomed to find in the mother s bosom a perpetual 
refuge, to bring there all its little woes — so 
small to us, to it so large — to get answers to all 
its questions, interest in all its discoveries, sym- 
pathy in all its amusements ; over a child so 
trained the influence of the mother is enormous, 
nay, unlimited. What a safeguard to both ! not 
only in childhood, but in after-years. To feel 
that she is an absolute providence to her child — 
that from babyhood it has clung to the simple 
belief that mamma must be told everything, and 
can right everything. What an incalculable 
blessing ! lasting till death, and after — the re- 
membrance of a mother from whom the child 
has never received anything but love! 

Love, the root of sympathy, is the most power- 
ful agent in the bringing up of children. Not 
mere caresses ; yet these are not to be despised, 



IN THE WAV HE SHOLLD GO. 111 

as being "the outward and visible sign of an 
inward and spiritual grace." The earliest develop- 
ment of our nature is so entirely objective rather 
than subjective, practical rather than ethical, 
that a kiss or a cuddle at all times is a much 
more potent agent in moral education than stern 
elder folk believe. Love, not in word only, but 
in action ; love, ever at hand to remove small 
evils, to lessen great ones ; to answer all ques- 
tions, and settle all difficulties ; to be a refuge in 
trouble, a sharer in joy, and a court of appeal 
where there is always certainty of sympathy 
if not redress ; this is the sort of thing which 
gives to parents their highest, noblest influence 
— beginning with birth and ending only with 
the grave. 

An influence which alone can knit anew the 
parental and filial tie at the time — and this time 
comes in all lives — when it is so apt to loosen ; 
I mean when the child, which at first had 
seemed a mere mirror reflecting the objects 
placed before it, develops into an individual 
character, sometimes a character as different 
as possible from both father and mother. 



n8 HOW TO TRAIN UP A PARENT 

This is a hard crisis, common though it be. 
Fathers who see their boys growing up without 
a single habit or taste resembling their own, 
mothers who perplexedly trace in their young 
daughters some type of womanhood totally dis- 
tinct from, and perhaps very distasteful to, them- 
selves, are surely much to be pitied. But so are 
the children, especially those who, with their 
originality, impetuosity, and passionate impulses 
after unknown good, have all the ignorance of 
youth concerning the known good —the patience, 
the wisdom, the long-suffering, which is, or 
ought to be, the strongest characteristic of 
parents. 

It has been learned by them through years of 
sore teaching. That perpetual self-denial, which, 
as I have said, begins at the very cradle — that 
habit of instinctively thinking, in all things 
great and small, not of their own pleasure, not 
even of their child's pleasure, but of that child's 
ultimate good — has been in all parents who really 
deserve the name a training they can never 
forget. It helps them now, in this difficult time, 
which, I repeat, comes soon or late in almost all 



IN THE WAF HE SHOULD GO. ng 

families ; when there is a grand clashing of 
rights and conflict of duties, occasionally ending 
in a general upbreaking of both. 

A child's first rights are, I have said, plain 
enough ; as plain as the parent's duties. After- 
wards they become less clear. The extent to 
which a parent should put up with a child, or a 
child withstand a parent, is most difficult to de- 
cide. Equally difficult is it to say how far both 
are right or both wrong, in the sad season when 
one side becomes exacting and the other care- 
less ; when, despite all outward show of respect 
and affection, the father feels indignantly that 
his influence over his boys is almost nothing, 
and the mother, with a sharp pang at her heart, 
which she vainly tries to hide, is conscious that 
her young daughter, who for twenty years has 
been the delight of her eyes, prefers being the 
delight of other eyes, and, though very kind to 
her, finds her — just a little uninteresting. 

The time — it must come to us all — when we 
cease to be a sort of lesser providence to our 
children, who cease in their turn to look up to 
us and lean all their troubles upon us ; when 



i2o HOW TO TRAIN UP A PARENT 



they begin to think and act for themselves, and, 
quite unconsciously perhaps, put us a little on 
one side as old, and odd, and out of date; un- 
questionably this is a bitter climax to our years 
of patient love. Yet it is but a portion of the 
training — usually the highest and best training 
we ever get — which God gives to us through 
our children. And it is not impossible to be 
passed through, and safely, too, on both sides ; 
especially in families which have been brought 
up on the principle I have before upheld — of 
absolute right, to be followed without regard to 
either benefit or injury, pleasure or pain. 

The doctrine with which I started — of the 
child's claims upon the parent being far 
stronger than those of the parent upon the 
child — teaches us, to the very last, at least tole- 
rance. If our sons resist us in choosing a 
career, or, still worse, in choosing companions 
that we believe will ruin that career — if our 
daughters will go and fall in love with the last 
men in the world we would have desired for their 
husbands — well, why is this r These young souls 
were given to us apparently an absolute blank 



IN THE WAY HE SHOULD GO. 121 

page, upon which we might write what we chose. 
We have written. It is we who have formed their 
characters, guided their education, governed 
their morals. Everything they are now we have 
or are supposed to have made them ; at least, 
we once thought we should be able to make 
them. If they turn out well we shall assuredly 
take the credit of it ; if they turn out ill — what 
say we then ? That it is their fault, or ours ? 

As a general rule, if, as soon as time has 
enabled our sons and daughters to escape out of 
our authority, they escape out of our influence 
also — if, having ceased to rule, we have no power 
to guide — there must be something wrong some- 
where ; somebody has been to blame. Can it 
possibly be ourselves ? 

The system that prevention is better than 
cure, is infallible with little children — no one 
doubts that. Any parents who for want of 
rational precaution allowed their children to fall 
into the fire or the water, or to do one another 
some serious bodily harm, would be stigmatized 
as either wicked or insane. Yet, when the 
young people are growing up — and just at the 



22 HOW TO TRAIN UP A PARENT 



most critical point of their lives — how often do 
these parents shut the stable door after the steed 
is stolen ! 

" Sir," said a shrewd old gentlemen, when 
questioned as to the character of one of his 
guests — " Sir, do you think I would ever let a 
young man inside my doors who was not fit to 
marry my daughter?" 

And the same principle might apply to sons : 
not only as to their marriage — which is a later 
affair, and one which after all they must settle 
for themselves — but as far as possible with regard 
to their ordinary associates and associations. 
Even as a wise mother makes her nursery one of 
the cheerfullest rooms in the house, a wise father 
will in after-years try to make his house one of the 
pleasantest places in the world to his grown-up 
sons — a home from which they will never care 
long to stray, and to which they will look back, 
amidst the storms of the world, as a happy 
haven, where was neither dulness nor harsh- 
ness ; where the reins of authority were 
prudently and slowly relaxed, until nothing 
remained of the necessary absolute control of 



IN THE WAV HE SHOULD GO. 123 

childhood, save the tender reasoning — " for your 
own good, my boy" — which boys so seldom 
fully prize until they have it no longer. 

Girls too, who may have lovers in plenty, but 
have only one mother ; perhaps some of them 
think, or have once thought, that a mother's 
sympathy and advice is the most intolerable 
thing imaginable in love-affairs, which gene- 
rally between parents and children are one 
long worry from beginning to end. This, even 
when the end is happy marriage. But how often 
do we see parents looking irritably or anxiously 
upon a long string of unmarried daughters, won- 
dering mournfully what in the world is to 
become of them by-and-by ? 

And here I must give utterance to another 
heresy. I think we English parents do not take 
half enough trouble to marry our children — that 
is, to give them fair opportunity of marriage. 
We are so apt to consider them exclusively our 
own property, and to feel personally aggrieved 
when they wish to strike into new ground, or 
form new ties for themselves. Or else we are 
weary and lazy ; life is not to us what it once 




124 HOW TO TRAIN UP A PARENT 

was — what it now is to them ; we prefer to sit 
at ease by the fireside ; visitors rather trouble 
us; we grudge our young people the society they 
naturally crave for, and in which, rationally 
guided, they would find their best chance of 
choice. 

Consequently, our sons often make rash 
mistakes in marriage — and our daughters not 
unfrequently do not marry at all. This is no 
dire misfortune. Anything less than a thoroughly 
happy marriage is to women much worse than 
celibacy ; but still it is a sad thing to parents to 
watch a family of girls " withering on the virgin 
thorn," with no natural outlet for their affec- 
tions ; themselves a little soured and their elders 
just a little disappointed j for no doubt there is a 
certain dignity in "my married daughter," 
perhaps as being an unconscious tribute from 
the son-in-law to the parent of his wife, never 
attained by the mother of unappreciated old 
maids. 

If foreign parents are to be blamed for the 
"arranged" or compelled marriages which we in 
free England so strongly condemn, I think we 



IN THE WAY HE SHOULD GO. .125 

are also to blame when we either deliberately 
stand in the way of our children's happiness, or 
tacitly let it slip by, giving them no opportunity of 
making a rational choice in marriage. Surely it is 
the bounden duty of wise elders not to ignore 
nature, but to accept the inevitable cares of 
" pairing-time/' when the young birds, fully 
fledged, will desire to leave the nest, however 
soft it is made ; when that overpowering instinct 
before which the warmest filial love sinks cold 
and colourless, will assert itself, ay, and guide 
itself too ; unless we have strength and self- 
denial — ah, no end to parental self-denial ! — to 
forget our personal pain, and throwing ourselves 
heartily into the young folks' place, succeed in 
guiding it a little also. 

At best, this love-season is a sad one, since 
few love-affairs are perfectly smooth and happy, 
and to see our children suffer is sharper than to 
suffer ourselves ; especially when we can no 
longer help them. While they are babies, there 
is a certain omnipotence about parenthood ; but 
when the time comes that the child's unfailing 
shelter is no longer the mother's heart, when 



iz6 HOW TO TRAIN UP A PARENT 

the father's strong right arm of guidance and 
protection sinks absolutely powerless — then 
things grow hard. 

Harder still, when, as sometimes happens, 
the parents' will pulls one way and the child's 
another. One side or other must yield. It is the 
last and sorest lesson in the parents' training, to 
feel that in most cases it is they who will have 
to yield. 

I do not uphold marriages against the consent 
of parents. I believe they never happen with- 
out something a little wrong on both sides ; and 
when they do happen, they always bring with 
them their punishment — to both. This, even 
when things smooth down, as they most often 
do. But the act itself remains, and the result of 
it — even as I heard a young daughter lately 
protest, when her lover was interdicted the 
house — " Why do you blame me, mamma ? You 
married papa in direct opposition to your 
parents." 

And this must sometimes be done. Both 
the laws of our country, and the honest moral 
sense thereof, allow it. Abroad, it is more 



IN THE WAY HE SHOULD GO. 127 

difficult. But here in England, after the age of 
twenty-one, any young man or woman may 
deliberately walk out of the father's house and 
into the nearest church, and be married to 
whom he or she pleases. But, I think, the only 
permissible way of so doing lies in doing it 
thus openly and deliberately, and after all 
rational submission and persuasion have failed. 
Such a marriage cannot be a happy thing ; it 
will be a sore thing in many ways to all parties, 
as long as they live. But it may be a necessary 
and not unrighteous thing, and it may turn out 
a portion of that salutary training which is given 
us, not by our children, but by heaven, through 
them. 

Looking at things in this light, we can better 
learn to bear the griefs and perplexities of 
that troublous time to which I am referring. 
It may be lightened, if we take care to keep for 
our grown-up sons and daughters the same key 
which unfailingly unlocked the baby-heart — sym- 
pathy. A broken doll — a broken heart — has not 
the mother's heart balm for both ? That is, if 
we still have strength not to think of ourselves 



128 HOW TO TRAIN UP A PARENT 

first, but of our children. Above all, not to be 
vexed or irritated, as we sometimes are, even at 
their happiness. For under the most favourable 
circumstances, what son ever brought to his 
mother a daughter whom she really considered 
worthy of him ? And what father ever gave his 
consent to the addresses of the most unexcep- 
tionable of sons-in-law, without a secret wish 
to shut the door in his face ? 

Yes, there may be wounds — there must be ; 
but they will not be poisoned wounds, if the 
parents have done their duty. And by-and-by 
the reward will come, if reward ever does come, 
as a complete thing, or is ever meant to do so, 
in this world. Certainly not parental reward. 
If parents work for that they will fail. " Take 
this child and nurse it for 'Me " — is God's com- 
mand concerning every little soul put into life. 
How few parents either hear, believe, or obey 
it, He knows. 

Yet the truth remains a truth still, and like- 
wise a consolation. Even as a young mother 
sees, and will often have to see, her little one 
turn from her to some more amusing person, 



IN THE WAY HE SHOULD GO. 129 

who perhaps is less strict, less wise, merely 
thinking of her or his own pleasure with the 
child, and not the child's real good ; so many 
a mother, well on in years, may have to be 
taught the sad but wholesome lesson that her 
children were not merely her children, made 
exactly after her pattern, and bound to minister 
solely to her comfort and carry out her wishes, 
but were also meant to be, so to speak, the 
children of heaven. If they continue such, liv- 
ing out their life in righteous and honourable 
fashion, even though it may not be her life, 
nor carried out after her fashion — still, she will 
accept the will of heaven, and learn to be 
content. The mental training has been gone 
through ; she has educated her children, and 
they have educated her; all may not be perfectly 
smooth and happy, but still all is well. 

Every mother must be in degree a sort of 
Hannah. She may bring her son his little 
coat — she may come up to see him yearly in the 
temple ; but with all that she must give him to 
God. To give our children up to God, to end 
with a training totally different from that with 

K 



130 HOW TO TRAIN UP A PARENT 

which we began, to be obliged to recognise 
our own powerlessness, and learn to sit still 
with folded hands, resigning them and their 
fortunes into their own hands —or rather into 
Higher hands than either theirs or ours — this is 
no easy lesson for parents. And yet we must 
learn it — the sharpest and the last. 

No, not quite the last. As said a little girl 
of six — whose only idea of death was of " going 
up into the sky," and being made perfectly happy 
and lovely and good — after being taken to see 
an old woman of ninety-nine, " Oh, mamma, 
please don't live to be ninety-nine. You '11 be 
so ugly !" 

Alas, there comes a time when we know we 
must be " ugly," more or less ; physically, and 
perhaps morally too ; when the worn-out body 
will not respond to the mind, or, maybe, even 
the mind is wearing out, so that by no pos- 
sibility can we give pleasure, and may give 
much pain, even to our best beloved. 

This is a hard time ; nor is it wonderful that 
parents and children sometimes succumb to 
it, and the relation, once so sweet and easy, 



IN THE WAY HE SHOULD GO. 131 

becomes a heavy burden. But there are parents 
who make it much heavier than it need to be, 
by their extreme selfishness, their utter want of 
recognition of the fact that the most duteous 
child that ever was born cannot live for ever 
in a sick-room or beside an arm-chair. The 
younger life has to last long after the elder one 
is ended. To blight it, even for a time, by any 
unnecessary ^suffering is a cruelty, which not 
even the sternest upholder of filial duty can ever 
justify. 

I have seen parents, not intentionally selfish, 
who, when old age came upon them, grew so 
exacting, fretful, irritable, compelled such con- 
stant attendance, and insisted on such incessant 
sacrifices, as literally to take the life — or at least 
all that life was worth — out of their children, 
whom everybody but themselves saw were being 
" killed by inches," as the phrase is. Only 
fancy ! living till one's best friends say with 
bated breath, " If it would but come to an end " 
— that is, our life ; as the only means of saving 
other and more precious lives. 

But this need not be — it ought never to be. 



132 HOW TO TRAIN UP A PARENT 

A little self-control at the beginning, a steady, 
persistent recognition of the fact that the young 
are young, and we are old ; they blooming, we 
fading ; they going up the hill, and we down it 
— that this is God's will, to be accepted placidly 
and cheerfully, and made as little trouble about 
as possible, and we need not fear ever becoming 
very " ugly." Especially since, as the mother 
answered that little girl, we need not have much 
fear of living till ninety-nine. 

But before the " ugly " time there is another, 
which must be rather sweet than sad — the silent 
time " between the lights " — when the labour of 
the day is over, and the rest of the night not 
yet come ; when the house is empty of little 
feet and noisy tumultuous voices, and the 
parents, who once thought they would have 
given anything in the world for quiet, now 
have quiet enough ; only too much perhaps. All 
the obstreperous young flock are grown up and 
gone away, some into married homes, some into 
the work of the busy world, some into a silenter 
world, where earthly work is over. And these, 
I think, are the only children parents keep for 



IN THE WAY HE SHOULD GO. 133 

ever. The others come and go, returning to the 
old home merely for a little while ; but still it is 
plain to see — often they allow it to be seen, a 
little too plainly — that the parents' house is their 
real home no more. 

And so the two old folks — fortunate if there 
are still two — must learn to sit tog-ether by 
their silent fireside, remembering that they 
have but gone the way which their parents 
did before them, and their children must follow 
after ; that all is quite natural, quite right, 
and there is nothing to complain of: only, 
sometimes, it feels just a little hard. 

Or, it would feel hard, had we not strength 
to take in that consolation which I have spoken 
of — that our children are God's children as much 
as ours — lent, and not given. "Inasmuch as ye 
have done it unto the least of these, ye have 
done it unto Me." 

And He never denies us the reward. It 
comes, in a certain degree, from the very first ; 
for amidst the endless trouble they give, the 
almost unbearable trials to patience and 
temper that they bring, every child brings its 



i34 HOW TO TRAIN UP A PARENT 



own blessing likewise. A daily blessing — re- 
freshing, soothing, cheering — for the com- 
panionship of an ordinarily good and intelli- 
gent boy or girl is often better than that of 
any grown-up person. And the love of a 
child, its absolute unshaken trust — when it 
has always met trust for trust, and love for 
love — how sweet both are ! How perfect is the 
delight, the perfection of all human delights, 
of those years when parents have their little 
flock around them, and watch them grow up 
day by day, like the Holy Child of Nazareth — 
" in wisdom and in stature, and in favour with 
God and man." 

There i°^ a joy, greater than even the joy of 
a mother over her first-born, or the exultation 
of a man over the baby-son to whom he hopes 
to bequeath his honour, his worldly goods, and 
his unblemished name ; and that is, to have 
arrived at old age and seen this child, from its 
own day of birth to its parents' death-day, liv- 
ing the life they would have it live, carrying 
out the principles they taught it, and being in 
every way what I have called "the child of 



IN THE WAY HE SHOULD GO. 135 

heaven " — God's child as well as theirs. Then, 

all the training, bitter and sweet, which they 

have undergone, and made their child undergo 

— for no parents are worth the name who have 

not strength sometimes to wring their own 

hearts, and. their child's too, for a good end — 

will have been softened down into permanent 

peace. A peace, enduring even amidst all the 

trying weaknesses of old age, all the probable 

sufferings of the failing body and worn-out 

mind ; lasting even to the supreme moment, 

when the aged, dying head rests on the still 

young breast, and the child kisses the closed 

eyes, which, through all anxiety, pain, even 

displeasure, never lost their look of love — never 

till now. And now it is all ended. — No, not 

ended — God forbid. 

There was a parent I knew — one who had 
been both father and mother to his children 
(as some fathers can be, and are, thank God !) 
for nearly half a century. Passing away, in the 
ripe perfectness of a most noble life, he was 
heard to whisper feebly, " Adieu, ma fille ! " 
She sobbed out, " Non, non, mon pere ! " He 



136 HOW TO TRAIN UP A PARENT, ETC. 

lifted himself up in the bed, and with the old 
gleam in his eyes, the old force in his voice, 
to an extent of which those present had hardly 
believed a dying man capable, exclaimed, 
" Non, non. Pas adieu ! — Au revoir ! ' 

And surely if there are any meetings, any 
reunions granted in the other world, they will 
be granted to parents and children. 

****** 

" Train up a parent in the way he should go," 
was the queer title I gave to this sermon. 
You may have begun it with a smile ; perhaps 
you will have ended it, as I do, with something 
more like a tear. That is just what I meant. 
Farewell. 



Sermon W. 
BENEVOLENCE— OR BENEFICENCE ? 



IV. 

BENEVOLENCE— OR BENEFICENCE ? 

T DO believe that one half the so-called 

* charity' going is, in its results, worse 

than an error — an actual crime. Suppose you 

were to write an essay upon 'The Crime of 

Benevolence ! ' " 

The arch-heretic who suggested this had been 
spurred on thereto by a recent visit to a very 
" benevolent ' parish, probably one of the 
richest and most charitable parishes in the 
kingdom. It possessed — possesses still, for 
aught I know — within a very moderate area, 
not too densely populated, three churches, one 
chapel, and two iron rooms for mission ser- 
vices. It had clothing clubs, coal clubs, 
blanket clubs, provident and work societies. 
At its parish school an admirable education 



Ho BENEVOLENCE— OR BENEFICENCE? 



could be got for threepence a week. Its penny- 
readings for the men, its mothers' meetings for 
the women, gave every opportunity of mental 
and moral improvement to that class which 
we patronisingly term " our poorer brethren." 
In short, everything was done that could be 
done to make poverty unnecessary and vice 
impossible. 

Yet, my informant confessed, both abounded. 
Public-houses stared you in the face at every 
corner, and were always full — of women as 
well as men. Consequently, wretched homes, 
neglected children, young women whom no 
wise mistress of a house ever thought of 
taking into her service, middle-aged women 
whom to employ as laundresses, sempstresses, 
or even charwomen was hopeless — their cha- 
racters were so bad. Even the long-suffering 
clergymen's wives and district visitors, trying 
continually to do good, were as continually 
baffled. Nobody having once employed the 
objects of their hopeless compassion, ever did it 
again. Charity these people were always open 
to receive, but the best kind of charity — work — 



BENEVOLENCE— OR BENEFICENCE? 141 

it was useless to give, if the giver wished it to 
be anything better than a disguised form of 
almsgiving. 

And yet this place was an El Dorado of 
benevolence ; where the poor not only got 
their daily bread, but got it buttered on both 
sides. An opportune death, or fortunate acci- 
dent, would bring to the spot half-a-dozen 
clergymen with prayers and purses, half-a- 
dozen ladies following with tracts and clothes ; 
until the sufferers, becoming quite important 
people, realised fully the advantage of being 
" afflicted," and continuing to be. One story I 
heard of a labourer's household, which, deprived 
suddenly of its drunken head, found itself 
" assisted" so much, that when it went to church 
next Sunday in its new clothes, a shrewd neigh- 
bour declared it reminded her of Mrs. Holland's 
tale, "The Clergyman's widow, and her young 
family." And the youngest child being met 
afterwards, "Yes, ma'am," said the mother, in 
a whining tone, " I've just been taking Bobby 
to the doctor, and he orders him wine," with 
a glance that, meeting no response, dropped 






1 42 BENEVOLENCE— OR BENEFICENCE? 

immediately. But the habit of begging was 
too strong to be resisted. " Do you think, 
ma'am," with an additional whine of humility, 
" you've got such a thing as a pot of strawberry 
jam for Bobby to take his physic in:' 3 

It is these sort of people who harden one's 
heart, and incline one to rank our benevolent 
friends with two other classes, equally injurious 
— I was going to write obnoxious — the folk who 
pride themselves on the fact that if they have 
a fault, it is being too " tender-hearted ;" and 
those weak fools, the scourge and torment of 
society, who are politely said to be "nobody's 
enemy but their own." 

To call benevolence a crime ! To say that 
benevolent people actually injure those they 
attempt to aid ! It seems a curious paradox ; 
but does not experience prove it to be very 
near the truth ? And why r 

This question is best answered by another. 
What is benevolence ? Literally, the word 
means "wishing well," and I suppose we must 
take for granted that all benevolence really 
wishes well to its object ; that is, it would 



BENEVOLENCE— OR BENEFICENCE? 143 

rather do good than not, provided the thing 
costs little trouble. Beyond that — well, let 
any one of us try honestly, as honestly as if 
we all lived in the Palace of Truth, to analyze 
the motive of his next act of charity ; say, the 
next sixpence he gives to a street-beggar. 

Why does he give it ? First, probably, to 
save himself pain. It is decidedly painful to look 
upon distress, and troublesome to be followed 
down the street with whining petitions for aid. 
Also, a kind action gratifies our self-love, and 
makes us generally comfortable ; and to be 
thanked is more than comfortable — agreeable. 
So he extracts the coin from his pocket, throws 
it to the beggar, and goes his way ; but of the 
various complex motives for this benevolent 
action, almost all concern not the object of it, 
but his own self. Except, indeed, the natural 
motive of all benevolence, for which we ought 
in justice to give all benevolent people the 
credit, a- general kindly feeling to their species, 
and a wish to benefit them rather than do 
them harm. But the question — just as I argued 
in relation to self-sacrifice — whether the im- 



H4 BENEVOLENCE— OR BENEFICENCE? 



portant element in a gift is the advantage of 
the donor or the recipient, does not occur to 
them. 

Not, when the good deed is private and small, 
like the eleemosynary sixpence referred to : still 
less when the benevolence is public ; say, a 
church collection when the churchwarden, our 
neighbour and friend, is holding the plate ; or 
a subscription to a charity, in which every- 
body will see our name, and the sum appended 
thereto. 

Now I do not mean to be severe upon the 
many rich people in our rich England, whose 
purses are always open to public or private 
charity. They do their duty. Society expects 
it of them, and they know it does. Besides, they 
really like to do good, and the easiest w T ay of 
doing it is through their pockets. Any other 
way takes such a world of trouble ; and they 
dislike trouble, — most people do. They give — 
to anybody or anything — of what costs them 
nothing, and which they never miss. They 
enjoy all the credit of doing a generous action, 
and the burden of really doing it falls upon 



BENEVOLENCE— OR BENEFICENCE ? 145 

other people. What matter ? they argue ; it is 
only division of labour. So others do the work, 
and they the magnificence. It is so easy to 
be magnificent, when one is either a spend- 
thrift or a millionaire. The difference looks 
very small; only a word, or a few letters in a 
word ; yet, if we examine it, it is enormous. 
It is the difference between Benevolence and 
Beneficence. 

An extravagant person may be as extravagant 
in his charities as he is in his luxuries ; for 
charity is, in truth, a sort of luxury. Many 
a man called benevolent is simply wasteful, 
and the cause of waste in others ; for to give 
away money without considering how far the 
recipient has a right to it, or will benefit by 
it, is no more an act of benevolence than is 
throwing down a handful of coppers to be 
scrambled for in the street. 

Another of the most dangerous and difficult 
sort of benevolent people are those who are 
always willing to do everything for everybody, 
who go about with a long string of proteges whom 
they are ready to foist upon us on the smallest 

L 



i 4 6 BENEVOLENCE— OR BENEFICENCE? 

excuse. These general accepters and protectors 
of waifs and strays are very troublesome folk. 
In the first place, because so evenly is desert 
and deserving apportioned, even in this life, that 
I believe few people remain waifs and strays 
permanently, without there being some inherent 
cause for that condition. Trouble comes g alike 
to all ; but some deserve it — others do not. 
Some rise out of it — have the faculty to rise 
out of it ; others never rise, and apparently have 
no care or wish to rise- And your carelessly 
benevolent people refuse to draw the distinction. 
Even if you draw it for them, they meet you 
with an avalanche of texts, such as, " He maketh 
his sun to shine upon the just and the unjust," 
&c, &c. 

They forget that they are not Providence. 
Besides, according to them, their proteges are 
never bad, only unfortunate. Their geese are 
always swans — in their eyes, simply because they 
patronise them. Patronage is so pleasant, and to 
be followed by a little crowd of admirers is so 
soothing to the benevolent mind. So they annoy 
us unbenevolent people at their pleasure, by 



BENEVOLENCE— OR BENEFICENCE? 147 

supplying the best of characters to incompetent 
servants, offering as candidates for important 
situations persons who have no recommendation 
whatever for the position, except the need of it, 
and so on. These are they who entreat us to 
get published feeble MSS., on the feebler plea 
that the authors " wish to add a little to their 
income/' or have experienced reverses, or would 
like to earn something for a benevolent pur- 
pose. As if these were any reasons for trying 
to do what they cannot do, or for others aiding 
them therein ; since, as a rule, good work de- 
serves good pay, and will get it ; bad work should 
get nothing, however great the need of the doer 
of it. 

But our short-sighted, kindly meaning friends 
cannot see this. They still keep urging us to 
employ unsuitable servants, who want our 
place so badly ; to send our children to a par- 
ticular school, or to deal at some special shop, 
not because it is the best school or the best 
shop, but because "the poor things are so ill off, 
you see ; it is quite a charity." 

Why are they so ill off? Is there not a cause 



148 BENEVOLENCE— OR BENEFICENCE) 

for it r Accidental misfortune will happen to all ; 
but, as I have said, and the observation of life 
forces me to believe it more firmly every year, 
no one ever remains unfortunate, without there 
being, generally speaking, some recondite reason, 
some " screw loose " somewhere, accounting for 
the fact. It may be a hard saying, but I fear it 
is only too true, that nobody ever becomes a 
permanent "object of charity/ 5 without having 
ceased to deserve it. 

This rule especially applies to the large class 
of which all of us know so many, who are said 
to live " from hand to mouth," the mouth being 
usually their own, and the hand that of their 
friends ; or rather the acquaintances who succes- 
sively acquire and renounce the title. 

" Neither a borrower nor a lender be, 
For debt oft loses both itself and friend." 

Itself, because the borrower seldom becomes 
such till he is in circumstances which make 
repayment at least doubtful ; the friend, because 
two friends who have been placed in that posi- 
tion together rarely recover the old relation 
entirely. A gift, out and out, is often a real 



BENEVOLENCE—OR BENEFICENCE? 149 

pleasure, an exceeding boon ; but a loan, if ever 
repaid, or very long of repayment, always places 
both parties in a false position. There is a sense 
of humiliation on the one side, of being made 
use of on the other, which creates reserve at any 
rate, even between sincere friends ; and, if there 
has been in the transaction the slightest insin- 
cerity, is fatal in its results. You pity, you 
pardon ; you regret, you apologize ; but you two 
are never quite as you were before. Of course 
there is no rule without exceptions ; still, ordi- 
narily speaking, they are the wisest people who 
follow Polonius's advice, and as long as possible 
preserve themselves from being either borrowers 
or lenders. 

But there is a form of borrowing and lending 
which becomes, on both sides, an error so great 
as to be little short of an actual crime : in the 
borrower, who borrows without hope or inten- 
tion of repayment ; in the lender, who does 
what he is asked to do from no sense of kind- 
ness, or justice, or even charity, but just " to get 
rid of the fellow," or from being himself " a 
fellow that can't say No." Worse sometimes, 



150 BENEVOLENCE— OR BENEFICENCE? 

a fellow who, from some business or worldly 
reason concerning the borrower and himself, is 
afraid of the consequences of saying No. There- 
fore he allows himself to pay a sort of black 
mail to the unworthy levier thereof; hating and 
grudging, but still paying it, and flattering him- 
self that it looks like benevolence. 

The cowardice of such conduct is only equalled 
by its folly. If my friend, so called, writes to 
me again and again, " Lend me five pounds to 
save me from ruin," the only rational reply is, 
" If only five pounds stands between you and 
ruin, you had better be ruined, and have done 
with it." To be perpetually stopping up a hole, 
which yawns the next day wider than ever, is 
the act not of generosity but of stupidity. Many 
a man has gone to ruin, the real ruin he first 
made a pretence of, because some weak, foolish 
relative or friend to whom he applied for money 
had not the sense to refuse it at once ; absolutely, 
remorselessly, at all cost of pain and wounded 
feeling between himself and his would-be debtor. 
Better a passing coolness than an enmity for 
life. 



BENEVOLENCE— OR BENEFICENCE? 151 

They who, for any of the motives here named — 
motives, you will observe, which affect their own 
personality more than the borrower's — continue 
lending to unfortunate people, simply because 
they are unfortunate, are guilty on three counts : 
first, towards themselves, for a pretence of 
generosity which is only egotistic selfishness ; 
secondly, towards the person they attempt to 
benefit, whom they do not benefit but rather 
injure ; thirdly, towards other and worthier 
persons, whom they lose the power of helping, 
by having helped unworthy ones. 

For the really deserving neither beg nor 
borrow — they suffer silently ; while the loud- 
complaining, ever-greedy applicants for aid, 
always get the best of what charity is going. 
I often think that much of the benevolence in 
this world is poured out like pig- wash : the pig 
who makes most noise, or who succeeds in 
getting his two feet in the trough while the 
others have but one, is the animal who swallows 
most and fattens fastest. 

That before-mentioned sixpence thrown to a 
mendicant, only to be converted into gin or beer, 



152 BENEVOLENCE— OR BENEFICENCE? 

that five pounds lent to a needy acquaintance, 
who always has been needy and always will be, 
because he has not the slightest sense of the 
value of money, nor the least conscience in 
obtaining it, or spending it, — these, with a 
hundred similar cases, are specimens of what 
I call the crime of benevolence. The donors 
err, not only in what they do, but in what they 
leave undone. They may be benevolent in 
vague intention, but of true beneficence they 
have not the slightest idea. 

The difference is this. Benevolence consists 
in mere kind feeling ; doing good certainly 
sometimes, but in a vague and careless way, 
and more for its own pleasure than for another's 
benefit ; giving, because to give is agreeable, 
but taking little pains to ascertain what has 
been the result of the gift. The donor has 
done his part, and that is enough. It may 
be another heresy, but I am afraid the reason 
that our charitable institutions are so numerous, 
and our subscription lists so easy to fill up, is 
because, of all modes of benevolence, giving of 
money is the one which involves least trouble. 



BENEVOLENCE— OR BENEFICENCE? 153 

But beneficence does cost trouble. It requires 
in the individual some rather rare qualities ; 
powers of administration and patient investi- 
gation ; clear judgment and capacity for work ; 
a kind heart, and a cool head, ay, and a hard 
head, too. The power of saying No, and the 
will to say it, with a steady, strong, unvarying 
justice, are as necessary as quick sympathy and 
ready help. 

Though, in the main, true beneficence aims 
less at helping people than at enabling them 
to help themselves, there will always be in the 
world a large amount of those who cannot 
possibly help themselves : the sick, the aged, 
the young, the hopelessly feeble and incapable. 
It is the more necessary that anybody who can 
do anything should be left to do it, or taught to 
do it, for Beneficence is always more of a teacher 
than a preacher. She would be more prone to 
set up a cookery-school than a soup-kitchen ; 
and would consider the building of a row of 
workmen's cottages, well arranged, well drained, 
well ventilated, of rather more importance than 
the erection of the finest church imaginable. 



154 BENEVOLENCE— OR BENEFICENCE? 

I think it is an open question how far real 
beneficence has to do with charity, i.e. giving 
of money, at all. Secondarily, of course, it must, 
but primarily. I was once talking with a lady 
whose name is sufficiently well known, though I 
will not give it here, and who has done more 
good in ameliorating the condition of the London 
poor than all the philanthropists, religious and 
otherwise, who have flooded the metropolis with 
their bounty, and left it, people say, especially 
at the East end, rather worse than they found 
it, in a condition of expectant pauperism, which 
is for ever crying, " Give, give, give. 5 ' Now, 
this lady told me, that during all the years of 
her dealings with the poor — the very poor — 
whom she has slowly lifted from the condition of 
savages, the savagery of London courts and 
alleys, into intelligent human beings — during 
all these years, she said, she had never given, in 
mere charity, one single shilling. Fair pay- 
ment for fair work, was the principle she in- 
variably went upon. She planned houses, 
with every comfort that a working man's 
family could require, but she exacted from her 



BENEVOLENCE— OR BENEFICENCE? 155 

tenants the weekly rent, and when they did not 
pay she turned them out ; she found employ- 
ment for all that would do it, but if not done it 
was not paid for ; she assisted the women in 
their efforts to become good housewives, taught 
them to cook, to sew, to make clothes ; she went 
from house to house, leaving behind her plenty 
of good advice and kindly sympathy, but never 
either a tract or a half-penny. She took endless 
trouble, ran no end of risks, and exerted an 
influence, almost miraculous, over her rough 
community ; but from first to last, she said, her 
experience was this, " Help the poor to help 
themselves. Give them advice, instruction, work 
— mixed with plenty of sympathy. Sometimes, 
in very hard cases, money's worth, such as 
clothes or food, but never under any circum- 
stances give them money." 

Yet this lady is one of the very few philan- 
thropists who have really met their reward, and 
seen the work of their hands prosper. Her 
little kingdom, which she rules with a kindly 
though most firm hand, is full of subjects who 
not only obey but love her. She enters fear- 



156 BENEVOLENCE— OR BENEFICENCE ? 

lessly into courts and alleys of the lowest class, 
known hitherto only to the inspector of nui- 
sances and the police detective ; she commences 
her reforms, and by-and-by the wild inhabitants 
are found as decent folk, living in decent dwell- 
ings, amenable to law, common sense, and 
kindly feeling. 

Moreover, she succeeds in what almost all 
charities fail in — she actually makes it pay. 
She has gained a small per-centage on the 
money employed, of which she has been so 
long the wise administrator. And this fact is 
confirmatory of another axiom of hers, proved 
by her own experience, that no charity effects 
so much permanent good as one which is, or 
soon can be made, self-supporting. In short, 
such is the necessary mutual relation between 
the helped and the helpers, the poor and the 
rich, that the former cease to value what they 
can get for nothing, and the latter soon find 
that while they think they are assisting the 
poor, they are only sinking them from honest 
independence to weak dependence, from mere 
poverty into absolute pauperdom. 



BENEVOLENCE— OR BENEFICENCE? 157 

I cannot more clearly describe what I mean 
by benevolence and beneficence than by putting 
this lady's work — the work of a lifetime — side 
by side with that in the "charitable" parish 
I have mentioned — also anonymously — where 
money was poured out like water, and the 
needy had but to ask and to have. Here, on 
the contrary, nothing was done from charity, 
everything from justice : the common justice 
between man and man which makes the la- 
bourer worthy of his hire, the rentpayer de- 
serving of a decent house to live in — as good 
a house of its kind for a mechanic as for a 
gentleman ; but at the same time exacting 
from the poor man, in proportion to his means, 
precisely the same honesty, sobriety, and con- 
scientiousness that is exacted in the class above 
him. 

Until " gentlefolk " believe this, and cease to 
regard their servants, clerks, &c., as inferior 
beings, from whom nothing is to be expected 
but a hand-to-hand struggle between rich and 
poor, employer and employed, as to who shall 
have the best of it ; until chey give up the system 



r 5 8 BENEVOLENCE— OR BENEFICENCE? 

of treating" their dependants as mere machines, 
out of whom as much work is to be got as pos- 
sible ; or as brute beasts, for whom no training 
answers but whipping or feeding, and to whom 
they may throw their charity as they would 
throw a bone at a dog, with as little care 
for the result of it ; — until this state of things 
ends, there must be always that secret enmity 
between class and class, that half-concealed, 
half-acknowledged difference in morals, feel- 
ings, and principles, which constitute the main 
difficulty of those who would fain have but one 
law of right for all, and look upon every man 
who fulfilled it as " a man and a brother." 

There is another phase of the crime of bene- 
volence, unconnected with money, which ought 
not to be passed over; that is the leniency 
with which some very well disposed people get 
to look on moral turpitude. Some do it through 
mere laziness or indifference. " It is not my 
business ; why should I give myself any trouble 
about it?" So they shut their eyes to wicked- 
ness — in their rich neighbour, whom they ask 
to dinner, though they are not quite sure he 






BENEVOLENCE— OR BENEFICENCE? 159 

was too honest in that business transaction of 
last week ; in their poor domestic, say, their 
coachman, who they know gets drunk every 
Saturday night, and beats his wife ; but the 
lodge is too far off to hear her cries, and, 
the carriage not being out of Sundays, John 
cannot drive his master into a ditch. So, since 
John is a good servant, and knows his business 
well, the master ignores the whole matter of 
the drunkenness : to notice it would be so very 
inconvenient. And Mr. Blank, whose acquaint- 
ance it would be so awkward to give up, is 
smiled upon blandly ; until some day he happens 
to be taken up for forgery. 

Others take their stand upon the divine say- 
ing, " I came not to call the righteous but 
sinners to repentance ; " and obeying it in their 
imperfect, finite way, gradually cease to take in- 
terest in any except sinners. All the drunkards 
of the parish, the unwived mothers, the scape- 
grace children, come to them, and by cant- 
ing phrases of oft-repeated contrition, and 
voluble promises of never-fulfilled amendment, 
coax them out of the benefits that honest people 



i6o BENEVOLENCE— OR BENEFICENCE? 

never get. The greater the sinner the greater 
the saint is, either really or ostensibly, their 
permanent creed. They take up with all the 
scamps in the parish, while the respectable 
working man — thank heaven, there is still many 
a one in our England, as honourable as any 
working gentleman, and often as true a gen- 
tleman at heart! — has with them no chance 
at all. 

True, these so-called Christians have always 
plenty of arguments on their side ; especially 
the parable of the Prodigal Son, and the "joy 
in heaven over one sinner that repenteth." But 
they forget that the prodigal when his father 
met him was no longer a prodigal; he had 
forsaken his evil ways, never to return to them 
more. Also, that the "joy" is supposed to be 
over a repentant sinner, not a sinner who still 
remains in sin. Christ, in His divinest charity, 
never does more for offenders than to pardon 
them, until they cease to offend. "Go," He 
says ; " go and sin no more, lest a worse thing 
happen unto thee." But for those who continue 
to sin there is, even according to the quoters of 



BENEVOLENCE— OR BENEFICENCE? 161 

Holy Writ — often so egregiously twisted and 
misapplied — a worse thing ; even as in the par- 
able of the fig-tree : " Cut it down ; why cum- 
bereth it the ground ? " And sometimes the 
kindest, wisest, most Christian act is — to let it 
be cut down. 

For instance, every one who gives money to 
a confirmed drunkard or profligate, thereby 
encouraging him in his vices ; every one who, 
for any reason, however compassionate, speaks 
what is called "a good word' 3 for a person 
whom he knows to be bad, condones sin, and 
is guilty of the result that follows. His lazy 
laxity allows these cumberers of the ground to 
take the life from wholesome trees. And, even 
as a man who sits with his hands folded, and 
allows his humble neighbours to wallow in 
dirt like pigs, saying, "I can't help it; it 
is not my affair," may one day have to 
see ghastly fever, bred in those backslums, 
stalk in at his own front door, and carry off 
his best-beloved child ; so any one who laughs 
at error as mere "folly," and puts a plaister 
upon ugly sin, connives dangerously at both. 

M 



i6z BENEVOLENCE— OR BENEFICENCE* 

He has shirked what was unpleasant ; he has 
been too lazy to take trouble; he has done 
his benevolence in the easiest way. He may 
yet have to pay for his mistaken mercy by 
being ground under the ever-moving wheel of 
an unerring justice; justice which, though it 
does not always reward, assuredly knows the 
way to punish. 

He is punished, this pseudo-benevolent 
person. He is eaten up by grasping, needy, 
ravenous dependants. He has often to stand 
helplessly by, and watch the widening spread 
of evils, which he might have stopped at once 
if he had only had the courage to take hold 
of vice and slay it with a strong, firm hand. 
He thinks himself bitterly wronged, and ac- 
cuses the world of shameful ingratitude : it does 
not strike him that the world really owes him 
nothing, since what he did was done to please 
himself. 

This especially applies to certain people, who 
for a time may gain much outside credit, which 
is indeed the thing they most desire, — those 
who delight in what they call " magnificence/* 



BENEVOLENCE— OR BENEFICENCE? 163 

They it is who always give a cabman half-a- 
crown when a shilling is his right fare ; who 
distribute money right and left in gratuities to 
servants ; who always make the handsomest 
of presents (especially to their rich friends), and 
like to head every subscription-list far above the 
rest. They never think that the cabman they 
over-pay will grumble at the next person who 
pays him his right fare, and no more ; that 
nothing so degrades, or even offends a good 
servant as to be requited in money for a 
simple kindness ; that the worth of a gift is 
nothing — the spirit of it everything ; and that 
to see your neighbours name down in a charity- 
list for a larger sum than either he or you 
can afford, is much more apt to make you close 
your purse-strings than to open them. 

Your "magnificent" people are in some things 
worse than the merely lavish, who give reck- 
lessly of that which costs them nothing ; they 
give deliberately, for the mere credit of giving, 
and for their own glorification. The praise of 
men is mostly their sole aim.. That " cup of cold 
water ** which the Divine Master named so ten- 



1 64 BENEVOLENCE— OR BENEFICENCE? 



derly, would be a drink quite too mean, too dis- 
creditable (to themselves), to offer unto anybody. 
It must be the best of wine, in a jewelled goblet, 
or must not be offered at all. 

Their notions of a present, too (and they give a 
good many of them), is the handsomest thing that 
money can purchase. A much handsomer thing 
than anybody else has given, and something 
that will make people cry out, "Whose gift is 
that ? What a very generous person he must 
be ! " But the suitableness of the present, and 
whether the recipient needed it or wished for it, 
is quite another thing. And unless the said 
recipient, whether pleased or not, pretends to 
be so, and overwhelms him with gratitude 
and delight, our " magnificent " friend is exceed- 
ingly offended. 

Speaking of this matter of giving presents, it 
is curious how few know how to bestow or to 
accept one, whether it be a kindly benefaction, 
from him who does not need to him who does, 
or a cadeau as the French term it, in their nice 
distinction of language — a " keepsake " between 
two people who are equals, if not friends. 



BENEVOLENCE— OR BENEFICENCE? 165 

I remember being much astonished (it was in 
the simple days of youth, when a good deal 
astonished one that does not astonish now), by 
hearing a conversation between a husband and 
wife, who had just received a present from a near 
relative whom they did not very much care for. 
They criticized it, they found fault with it ; they 
speculated as to what was the person's intention 
in sending it, and what was to be sent back in 
return. 

" Of course we must send something, and 
immediately," said the gentleman, who was of 
the " magnificent " order ; " I wish we could find 
out exactly what it cost, and then we could give 
them back one worth as much and a little over." 
"Just as much will do, I think, my dear," 
added the wife, who, like most wives of " mag- 
nificent " men, was obliged to think of economy. 
" But we must give something ; they will ex- 
pect it." 

This expecting something in return for a pre- 
sent is surely one of the meanest of feelings; 
yet it is at the root of half the gifts given. 
Marriage, christening, birthday presents are 



1 66 BENEVOLENCE— OR BENEFICENCE? 

made, not because people wish to give, but 
because they think they ought, and that other 
people will expect it of them. Gifts irksome 
to receive, and sometimes actually wrong to 
offer, as either draining purses already too 
slender, or irritating those who can afford it 
hj a kind of feeling that, as everybody knows 
they can afford it, they must give more than 
anybody else. If the " happy pair " who exhibit 
a roomful of such offerings could know all that 
they subject their friends to, or their friends 
foolishly subject themselves to, in this matter, 
they would turn with disgust from most of the 
presents they receive. I am not sure that it is 
not the truest kindness as well as wisdom to 
say point-blank, "I never give anything to 
anybody." 

Yet a gift is a pleasant thing, rightly given ; 
most pleasant and dear and sacred, whether its 
value be much or little, if only it is offered with 
the heart, and chosen from the heart. Chosen 
with care and pains, and a tender anxiety that 
it should be exactly the thing we liked and 
wanted. It is so sweet to be remembered and 



BENEVOLENCE— OR BENEFICENCE ? 167 

taken trouble over, even in the smallest things. 
But gifts carelessly given— merely to gratify a 
love of giving, which some people have even to 
a disease — given without thought of whether 
they will be useful or not, whether the receiver 
will care for them or not, are, between friends, 
often a great vexation ; between strangers, or 
any who are not exactly equals, a burden of 
obligation simply intolerable. 

The child, with its innocent sudden kiss, and 
its earnest, " Thank you so much ! " for a doll's 
sash, or a penny toy, which it really wanted, 
comes much nearer the true theory of giving 
and receiving than hundreds of people who 
weary themselves in choosing handsome pre- 
sents, or in returning equivalents for the same — 
presents which, the instant after they are made, 
become, like stopped cheques, "of no value to 
anybody," not even to the possessor. 

These — like the charity which is indifferent to 
error, and ready to overlook every sin that is 
not personally inconvenient to itself, as well as 
the generosity which looks not to the advantage 
of its object, but its own — these three may all 



1 68 BENEVOLENCE— OR BENEFICENCE ? 



go under the head of that sort of benevolence 
which, if not an actual crime, is a very great 
mistake and an egregious folly. 

Why? 

Here, again, we come to the root of things. 
Why ? Because it is content with wishing well, 
instead of doing well. Because whatever good 
it does is done, not for duty's sake, for righte- 
ousness' sake, for God's sake, but merely for its 
own sake ; to gratify its vanity, to ease its con- 
science, to heal up its wounded self-esteem with 
the smooth cataplasm of gratitude. 

But true beneficence never looks for gratitude 
at all. What it does is not done with a view to 
itself, but solely for the sake of that other whom 
it desires to benefit ; and above all for His sake 
who is the source of all charity. There is a 
deep truth in the passionate pleading of the 
Irish beggar : " Shure, sir, ye '11 do it ; not for 
the love o' me — for the love o' God." Therefore 
real beneficence, which does all its good deeds 
for the love of God, is neither vainglorious 
nor exacting; not easily wounded, and never 
offended. It goes straight on, doing what 



BENEVOLENCE— OR BENEFICENCE? 169 

it believes to be right and best, without 
any reference to what people may say of it, 
and whether the recipients of its bounty are 
grateful or not. 

A word about gratitude, which some people 
seem to think the natural result and reward of 
benevolence — to follow as unerringly as day 
follows night. Alas ! they had much better say 
as night follows day ; for kindly deeds as often 
end in darkness as in light — at least what 
seems like darkness to our human eyes. Unless 
benevolence, like virtue, can be its own reward, 
it must often rest satisfied with no reward 
at all. 

What matter ? Of course, gratitude is a 
welcome thing ; in this weary world a most 
refreshing thing ; but it is not an indispensable 
thing. It warms the heart and cheers the spirit, 
but it has nothing to do with either benevo- 
lence or beneficence, nor is it the origin or end 
of either. The wisest people are they, who, 
though happy to get thanks, never expect them, 
and can do without them. Such may be de- 
ceived and disappointed, but they are never em- 



170 BENEVOLENCE— OR BENEFICENCE? 

bittered ; because their motive lay deeper, and is 
higher, than anything belonging to this world. 
The truly benevolent man is he who, looking on 
all his charities great or small, says only — in 
devout repetition of his Master's words — " I have 
finished the work which Thou gavest me to do," 
— not that which I gave myself to do, and not 
that which I did for myself, but that which 
Thou gavest me and I have done for Thee. To 
such the answer comes, even as in Lowell's 
touching ballad of " Sir Launfal :" 

" The Holy Supper is kept indeed 
In what we share with another's need ; 
Not what we give, but what we share, 
For the gift without the giver is bare ; 
Who gives himself with his alms, feeds three : 
Himself — his hungering neighbour — and ME." 



Sermon IT- 
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER. 



MY BROTHER'S KEEPER. 

A RE we, or are we not — our brother's 
keeper ? That is, to what extent are we 
responsible for those beneath us, or dependent 
upon us, or connected with us by any link which 
gives us power with regard to them or influence 
over them ? 

This is, I think, the point at issue between 
those who are called philanthropists, and those 
others — well, I suppose no one would voluntarily 
dub himself misanthropist — but those who refuse 
to " bother ' ] themselves with their brother's 
affairs ; to whom the question, " Who is my 
neighbour ? " is as indifferent as the naturally 
succeeding one, " What have I to do for him ? " 
— in fact, people who, though they would 
be much offended if you said so, are of the 



174 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER. 

same type as the most respectable priest and 
Levite who preceded the good Samaritan in 
passing by him who " fell among thieves." 

A parable often misapplied, since many of 
the way-laid sufferers for whom our sympathy is 
demanded are very often thieves themselves ; 
the weak, the selfish, the unprincipled ; who live 
by robbing honest people, and by laying on 
others the burden of their self-created woes. 
But it is not of them I have now to speak, but 
of those designated by the word " brother." 

In the first place, who is our brother ? 

There are those who will tell us it is the 
negro, the South-Sea Islander — the " heathen 
Chinee ; " whom, as the first of moral duties, 
we must try to convert — (of course, to our own 
special form of Christianity, any other being 
worse than none, which a little complicates 
matters). Nevertheless, it must be done. And 
conversion gained, all else will follow. 

Be it so. Let those go proselyting who feel 
themselves thereto called. There is work 
enough in the world for all ; innumerable 
" brothers " — and very few who are fit, in any 



MY BROTHER 'S KEEPER. 



*75 



sense, to be their "keepers." But let not this 
interesting black or brown brother far away 
shut out from our sight the white brother who 
stands at our very door. Stand, did I say ? — He 
crawls — he grovels — not only outside but 
actually within our doors. We can scarcely 
take a step without treading upon him — even 
though we may shut our eyes to the sight of him. 
And we do shut our eyes, either intentionally 
or unintentionally. We prefer looking a long way 
off — upon objects picturesque and heroic. The 
" noble savage " running wild in his " native 
woods " is a much more interesting subject of 
civilisation than Billy the washerwoman's boy, 
especially when entering our family as William 
the boy in buttons. Yet, perhaps, he no less 
needs the care, and could be developed into at 
least as good a Christian, and at a somewhat 
cheaper rate. And the feminine hearts who 
yearn over the " condition of women in India " 
would find as worthy an object for their reforma- 
tory sympathy in Jane the gardener's wife, with 
six children, living in two rooms upon a pound 
a week, — or Emma the housemaid, insanely 



176 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER. 

spending all her large wages upon dress, and 
leaving herself not a half-penny for sickness or 
old age. 

" Charity begins at home " — the old-fashioned 
proverb used to say. But the peculiarity of our 
large-minded modern society is that " home " 
either does not exist, or that it is the last place 
in the world about which charity ever troubles 
itself. 

I have been led to this train of thought by 
two articles which appeared lately in a well- 
known Magazine, on the much-vexed question of 
domestic servants. The writers took opposite 
sides : one defended the lower class against the 
upper ; protested against the extreme ill-usage 
sustained by servants in general, and contended 
for their " privileges," averring that they ought 
to be allowed full time to cultivate their intel- 
lects — and that among other refinements there 
should be a library in every pantry, and a piano- 
forte in every kitchen. The opposing paper 
took the mistresses' side — the much-tried, 
much-enduring mistresses ; and, so far from 
allowing our domestics any rights would fain 






MY BROTHER'S KEEPER. 177 

have reduced servitude to its original mean- 
ing, and considered servants somewhat as the 
ancients considered their slaves — an altogether 
different order of beings from themselves. The 
first protested loudly that we were all brothers ; 
though the great point — which of us was to be 
"our brother's keeper" — was left untouched. 
The second, so far as I remember, almost denied 
that there was a common human nature between 
the kitchen and the parlour. 

Both meant well, I verily believe ; and both 
had a certain justice in their arguments. But 
the real truth, as in most contests, lay between 
the two. Let us consider it a little. 

Few will deny the melancholy fact that the 
servant question is growing more difficult year 
by year. Perhaps, naturally so, since every 
class is rising and trying to force itself into the 
class above it — a not ignoble aim, if it at the 
same time educates and fits itself to enter that 
class ; but it mostly does not do this. Therefore, 
a continual struggle goes on — a continual push- 
ing up of heterogeneous elements into the 
already wildly seething mass — and the result is 

N 



178 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER. 






— chaos ? Let us hope not. Let us trust that all 
will settle in time. Providence knows its own 
business much better than we do. 

Still we must do our business, too, and do it 
our very best. Anything short of our best is 
setting ourselves in opposition — oh, how futile ! 
— to Providence, and consequently to our own 
selves. He only who works with God, so far 
as he sees, works for God, and for himself at the 
same time. 

Those who remember the servants of even 
twenty-five years ago cannot fail to discover a 
great change in the whole class — as a class. 
Far less work is done by each individual ; 
and far more wages expected. The most faith- 
ful, intelligent, and clever servant I ever knew 
began life at thirteen years old, as maid-of-all- 
work in the family of a gentleman — a poor one 
certainly, still it was " a gentleman's family," 
— consisting of himself, his wife, and three chil- 
dren. Her wages the first year were three 
pounds per annum. What would be thought of 
such a "place" nowadays? Yet it turned out 
not a bad one. The girl was taken literally as 



MY BROTHER'S KEEPER. 179 

" one of the family." The mistress trained her ; 
the little ones loved her; the eldest daughter 
educated her — ay, up to a point that even the 
aforesaid article would approve, for she could 
read and understand Shakspere, and write as 
good a letter as most young ladies when they 
leave school and marry. She never married, 
but she remained faithful to the family in weal 
and woe — far more woe than weal, alas ! — until 
she died, but not until she had served two gene- 
rations. Her grave has been green now for 
many a year, yet the last remnant of that family 
never hears the sound of her name — a very com- 
mon one, " Bessy " — without a throb of remem- 
brance too sweet for tears. 

This is what servants used to be, as many an 
old family tradition will prove. What are they 
now? 

As an answer I could put forward two illus- 
trative anecdotes ; of the butler who threw up 
his place because he had " always been accus- 
tomed to have a sofa in his pantry," and the 
parlour-maid who, having accepted a situation, 
declined to go because she and her luggage were 



180 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER. 

to be fetched from the station in a spring-cart, 
whereas in her last place they had sent the 
carriage and a footman to meet her. These are, 
I hope, exceptional instances, but we all know 
what our own and our friends' servants are, in 
the main. 

As to dress, for instance. If extravagant folly 
of toilette were not becoming so common in all 
ranks, we should be absolutely startled by the 
attire of our cooks and parlour-maids — on Sun- 
days especially. And it is so utterly out of pro- 
portion to their means. Fancy our grandmothers 
giving Jenny the housemaid to Thomas the 
gardener to settle down in holy matrimony upon 
— say a pound a week ; and they are seen walk- 
ing to church — he in a fine black suit, and she in 
a light silk gown, tulle bonnet and veil, and a 
wreath of orange blossom ! Yet such has been 
the costume at more than one wedding which 
has lately come under my notice ; and I believe 
it is the usual style of such, in that class. 

Then as to eating and drinking ; the extent 
to which this goes on in large and wealthy 
families is something incredible. Stout footmen, 






MY BROTHER'S KEEPER. 181 

dainty ladies' maids, and under servants of all 
kinds expect to be fed with the fat of the land, 
and to drink in proportion. It is not enough to 
say that they live as well as their masters and 
mistresses — they often live much better ; the 
kind of fare that satisfied twenty or forty years 
ago would be intolerable now. Expense and 
waste they never think of ; they are only comers 
and goers according to their own convenience, 
and the more they get out of their "places'' 
during their temporary stay the better. 

This, too, is another sad change. A house 
where the servants remain is becoming such an 
exception as to be quite notable in the neigh- 
bourhood. 

"Why did I come after your place, ma'am r '* 
answered a decent elderly man, applying for a 
situation as gardener. " To tell you the truth, I 
heard yours was a place where the servants 
stayed ; so I thought it would suit me, and my 
wife too, and I came after it." Of course, he 
was taken, and will probably end his days 
there. 

But most servants are rolling stones which 



i8z 



MY BROTHER 'S KEEPER. 



gather no moss. Nor wish it even ; they prefer 
moving about. They change their mistresses as 
easily as their caps. The idea of considering 
themselves as members of the family — to stick 
to it, as it to them, through all difficulties not 
absolutely overwhelming— would be held as 
simply ridiculous. To them "master" is merely 
the man who pays ; and " missis," the woman 
who " worrits." That between these and them- 
selves there could be any common interest, or 
deep sympathy of any kind, never enters their 
imagination. Nor, alas ! does it into that of the 
upper half of the household. If the mistress, 
with a child dangerously ill up-stairs, is shocked 
to hear the unchecked merriment in the ser- 
vants' hall, why does she forget that not long 
ago she refused to let her cook away to see a 
dying sister because of that day's dinner-party ? 
" It would have been so very inconvenient, you 
know. Afterwards, I let her go immediately." 
Yes, but — the sister was dead. 

This may be a sharply drawn picture, but I ask, 
is it overdrawn ? Is it not the average state of the 
relation nowadays between masters and servants? 



MY BROTHER'S KEEPER. 183 

There may be strict uprightness, liberality, even 
kindness on the one side, and duty satisfactorily 
done on the other ; but of sympathy — the com- 
mon human bond between man and man, or 
woman and woman — there is almost none. No- 
body gives it, and nobody expects to find it. 

Why is this ? Or can it be the reason — there 
' must be a reason — that everybody declares it is 
almost impossible to get good servants ? 

May I suggest that perhaps this may arise 
from the fact of servants finding it so exceed- 
ingly difficult to get good masters and mis- 
tresses ? 

By good I mean not merely good-natured, 
well-meaning people, but those who have a 
deeply rooted conscientious sense of responsi- 
bility — who believe themselves to be, as supe- 
riors, constituted by God, not merely the rulers, 
but the guide and guard of their inferiors ; and 
whose life is spent in finding out the best way 
in which that solemn duty can be fulfilled. 

In every age, evil as well as good takes root 
downwards and bears fruit upwards. All re- 
formations, as well as all corruptions, begin 



1 84 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER. 

with the upper class and descend to the lower. 
Even as there is seldom an irredeemable naughty 
child without the parents being in some way to 
blame, so we rarely hear of a household tor- 
mented by a long succession of bad servants 
without suspecting that possibly the master and 
mistress may not be altogether such innocent 
victims as they imagine themselves. 

For it is from them, the heads of the house, 
that the house necessarily takes its tone. If a 
lady spends a large proportion of her income on 
milliners and dressmakers, how can she issue 
sumptuary laws to her cook and housemaid ? If 
a gentleman habitually consumes as much wine 
as he can safely drink — perhaps a little more, 
though he is never so ungenteel as actually to 
get " drunk" — how can he blame John the coach- 
man, or William the gardener, that they do get 
drunk — they who have nothing else to amuse 
themselves with ? For their master takes no 
care to supply anything that they rationally 
can amuse themselves with, being as indifferent 
to their minds as he is to their bodies. So that 
both are kept going like machinery, ready to do 



MV BROTHER'S KEEPER. 185 

their necessary work, nothing else is needed, 
and nothing ever inquired into. They, the 
master and mistress, are not their " brother's " 
keepers, — they are only his employers. They 
use him, criticize him, control him, are even 
kind to him in a sort of way, but they have no 
sympathy with him whatever. 

This is apparently the weak point — the small 
wheel broken — which produces most of the jar- 
ring in the present machinery of society. The 
tie between upper and lower classes has be- 
come loosened — has sunk into a mere matter 
of convenience. Not that the superior is in- 
tentionally unkind ; in fact, he bestows on his 
inferiors many a benefit ; but he does not give 
it, or exchange it; he throws it at him much 
as you would throw a bone at a dog, with the 
quiet conviction, " Take it — it is for your good ; 
but you are the dog, and I am the man, for all 
that." 

Is this right — or necessary ? That there 
should be distinctions of classes is necessary. 
Rich and poor, masters and servants, must 
always exist ; but need they be pitted against 



1 86 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER. 

each other — the one ruling, the other resisting ; 
the one exacting, the other denying, to the 
utmost of their mutual power ? That mys- 
terious link, which can bind together the most 
opposite elements, and which, in default of a 
better term, I have called sympathy — though 
using it more in the French than English 
meaning of the word — is altogether wanting. 

Was it always so ? In olden times, when the 
primitive institution of rude slavery softened 
into feudal servitude — the weak hiding together 
under shelter of the strong, and the ignorant 
putting themselves under the guidance of the 
educated — undoubtedly the relation was very 
different. The line of division between class 
and class was drawn as distinctly as now, and 
yet the bond was much closer and tenderer. 
The feudal lord had his retainers, the lady her 
serving-maids. These she instructed in. all 
domestic duties, even as he trained his men in 
the field. The root of the relationship was, of 
course, mutual advantage ; but it blossomed 
into mutual kindliness, and bore fruit in that 
fidelity which is not lessened but increased by 






MY BROTHER'S KEEPER. 187 

the consciousness of mutual dependence. The 
difference of rank was, so far as we can dis- 
cover, maintained in these old days as strongly 
as now ; but it was like the difference between 
parent and child — where the one exercises, and 
the other submits to, an authority which is not 
mere arbitrary rule, but wise control and gene- 
rous protection. 

This, I think, is the point which all shoot 
wide of nowadays ; the magic charm which 
nobody can find. They will not recognise that 
the kingly relation — for every head of a house- 
hold must be a king therein, nay, an autocrat, 
since a wise autocracy is the safest and simplest 
form of government — the regal relation also in- 
cludes the parental. The Romans understood 
this in the words " paterfamilias," " mater- 
familias ; " " familias " implying not only the 
children but the servants. Is it too startling 
a theory to assert that the heads of a large 
household are nearly as responsible for their 
servants as they are for their children ? and 
that the servants owe them the same kind of 
duty — faithfulness, gratitude, loving obedience I 



1 88 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER. 

Not blind obedience, but a clear-sighted sub- 
mission ; which must be won, not compelled ; 
and can only be won by the exercise of those 
qualities — the only qualities which justify one 
human being in being the master of another. 
This, I believe, is the principle upon which 
we are constituted "our brother's keeper/' 
A principle which modern masters and mis- 
tresses, who take their servants from the nearest 
register office, and return them thence when 
they have done with them, will call perfectly 
Utopian. Did they ever try to put it in 
practice r 

In the first place, what is their definition of 
a servant ? A person who will do the pre- 
scribed work in the most satisfactory manner, 
for reasonable wages, and, beyond that, give 
as little trouble as possible. Somebody who 
comes when convenient, is treated as con- 
venient, and got rid of also when convenient, 
to the establishment. If servants " suit " the 
place, or the place suits them, they stay ; if not, 
they go ; and there is an end of it. The idea 
that they "enter a family," as the phrase is, 



MY BROTHER 'S KEEPER. 1 89 

to become from that day an integral portion 
of it, to share its joys and sorrows, labours 
and cares, and to receive from it a corre- 
sponding amount of interest and sympathy, 
thereby commencing and cementing a per- 
manent tie not to be broken except by serious 
misconduct or misfortune, or any of those in- 
evitables which no one can guard against — 
this old-fashioned notion never occurs to any- 
body. 

Hence the rashness with which such engage- 
ments are formed. The carelessness manifested 
by most people in engaging their servants is 
almost inconceivable. The "place" is applied 
for ; or the mistress applies at a register office. 
Out of numerous candidates she selects those 
she thinks most likely ; the " character " is 
sought and supplied ; if that is satisfactory, 
all is settled ; and a man or woman, whom 
nobody knows anything of, is thereupon brought 
into the family, to hold in it the most intimate 
relation possible. Of course, such an arrange- 
ment may succeed ; but the chances that it 
will not succeed are enormous. 



r 9 o MY BROTHER'S KEEPER. 

This formality of "getting a character" has 
often seemed to me one of the most curious 
delusions that sensible people labour under. 
When written it is almost valueless ; anybody 
can forge it, or, even giving it bond fide, may 
express it in such a way as to convey anything 
but the real truth. Besides, is that truth the 
real truth ? When we consider the prejudices, 
the vexations, on both sides, which often arise 
in parting with a servant, can we always de- 
pend upon a faithful statement, or upon those 
who make it ? I have often thought that, instead 
of inquiring any servant's character, we ought 
rather to inquire the character of the late mistress. 

Besides, as a rule, a really efficient servant 
needs no character at all. Such a one on 
leaving a situation is sure to have half-a-dozen 
families eager to secure so rare and valuable 
a possession. A good servant never lacks a 
place ; a good master or mistress rarely finds 
any want of good servants. Temporary diffi- 
culties may befall both ; but in the long run it 
is thus. Even as — if one carefully notices the 
course of the world — every man, be he religious 



MY BROTHER'S KEEPER. 19 1 

or irreligious, will come, at the middle or end 
of life, to the same conclusion as David : — " I 
have been young, and now am old ; yet never 
saw I the righteous forsaken, nor his seed 
begging their bread." Not that all is smooth, 
or easy, or fortunate ; on the contrary, " Many 
are the troubles of the righteous ;" but " the 
Lord delivereth him out of them all." 

And so, to measure small things by great, 
I believe that, though accidental difficulties may 
arise, a good servant may drift into a bad 
place, a conscientious master or mistress may 
be cheated here and there by unfaithful ser- 
vants, still, in the long run, things right 
themselves. No law is more certain in its 
ultimate working than that which affirms that 
all people find their own level, and reap their 
own deservings. 

But to come to practicalities — and yet I believe 
no practical work is ever done so well as when 
it has a strong spiritual sense at the core of it — 
what is the first thing to be considered in 
choosing one's servants ? I answer, unhesi- 
tatingly — their moral nature. 



1 92 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER. 

"What!" I hear some fashionable mistress 
exclaim, " trouble myself about the moral 
nature of John the footman, or Sarah the cook 
— or even, though they cOme closer in contact 
with me, of my housemaid, nurse, or lady's 
maid ? Impossible ! simply ridiculous ! So 
that they do their work well, and don't trouble 
me, that is all I require." 

Is it all? You are then content to have 
about you continually mere machines, the mo- 
tive power of whose existence you are utterly 
ignorant of ? What hold have you upon them ? 
what guard against them ? what guarantee for 
virtue, or preservative from vice ? Vice which, 
say what you like, must affect you and yours, 
sometimes in the very closest way. 

Nothing is more remarkable than the ex- 
treme foolhardiness, to say the least of it, 
with which respectable families put themselves 
at the mercy of strange servants, of whose 
antecedents they know nothing, or know only 
that they are capable of doing their allotted 
work, are " trained parlour-maids," " good plain 
cooks," and so on. But of their moral charac- 



MY BROTHER 'S KEEPER. 1 93 

teristics, their tempers, principles, habits — all 
that constitutes the difference between bad 
people and good, those who are a comfort and 
help, or else an absolute torment and curse 
in a household, the heads of that household 
are in entire ignorance. Yet they expect, 
besides efficiency in work, all the fidelity, con- 
scientiousness, and other good qualities which 
they would have found in a person whom they 
had known all their lives, who was trained in 
all their ways, and accustomed to all their pecu- 
liarities. 

Do they never consider that in this, as in 
most things, we only get what we earn, and 
can get nothing without earning it ? That if 
we want really good servants, we must make 
them such ? We must bring them up, even as 
we bring up our children, with the same care 
and patience, making allowance for the nice 
distinctions of character in every human being ; 
and, above all, having the same sense of respon- 
sibility, though in a lesser degree, that we have 
concerning our own family. 

To this end it is advisable to take young 

o 



194 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER. 

servants, which most people object to. They 
prefer domestics ready made, that is, made by 
other people, who have had all the trouble of 
training them. But these can never suit us so 
well, or have the same personal attachment 
for us, as those we have trained ourselves. 

For I hold — strange doctrine nowadays ! — 
that personal attachment is the real pivot upon 
which all domestic service turns. It may sound 
very ridiculous that a lady should try to win 
the hearts of her cooks and housemaids, and a 
gentleman trouble himself as to whether his 
coachman or gardener had a respectful regard 
for " master." Yet otherwise little real good is 
effected on either side. 

Without love, all service becomes mere eye- 
service, or at best a cold matter-of-fact doing 
one's duty : any attempts at training are al- 
most useless ; and with already trained and 
efficient servants, their very efficiency is, the 
heart being wanting, an unsatisfactory thing, 
— like being served by the two hands, which 
waited upon the Prince in the fairy tale of the 
White Cat. Admirably competent hands, no 



I 



MY BROTHER'S KEEPER. 195 

doubt, but a poor exchange for the bright face 
and pleasant voice of what children call "a 
person," and a person that loves us. 

I am bold enough to say that, in a really 
happy and well-arranged househould, it is abso- 
lutely indispensable that the servants should 
really love "the family," and be loved by them. 
Under no other conditions can the duty which 
is laid upon us of being our brother's keeper 
be thoroughly fulfilled. And how is this to 
be done ? 

" I can't imagine why it is that my servants 
never take to me," said a very kind but reserved 
mistress, complaining to another who was more 
happily circumstanced • " I am sure I mean them 
well — would do all I could for them, only some- 
how I never know how to talk to them." 

That is the very reason. Most people never 
talk to their servants at all. They " speak ' : 
to them with patronising benignity, they order 
them, find fault with them, or sharply scold 
them ; but anything beyond that, anything that 
brings the two human beings face to face as 
human beings, such as cordial praise for well- 



ig6 



MY BROTHER'S KEEPER. 



doing ; quiet, serious, sorrowful rebuke for ill- 
doing* ; sympathy in trouble ; and last, not 
least, an equally quick sympathy in their 
pleasures and amusements — is a thing un- 
thought of on either side. Class and class go 
on their parallel lines, close together, yet 
eternally apart. 

It is sad as strange sometimes to notice the 
way in which presumably good people speak to 
servants, either with a cold, repellent reserve, or 
a furious unreserve, such as they would never 
use towards any other. Now he who flies into a 
rage and insults an equal may be a fool, but he 
who insults an inferior is worse — he is a coward. 
Many a gentleman in his stable, and many a 
lady in her kitchen or nursery, would do well to 
pause before condemning themselves as such. 

Nevertheless, to " spoil" a servant is as dan- 
gerous as spoiling a child. In both cases, dis- 
cipline must be kept up. The head of a house- 
hold is justified in laying down for it the strictest 
laws, and insisting that they shall not be broken. 
Mistresses might with advantage be very much 
severer than many now take the trouble to be, 



MY BROTHER'S KEEPER. 197 

against waste, over-dressing, over-feeding ; per- 
quisites, visitors, and all the luxurious items 
which make servants so expensive — to the 
family's injury and their own. And, laws once 
laid down, no alternative must be accepted. 
" Obey, or you leave my service," is the only 
safe rule. 

But this strictness is compatible with the ut- 
most kindliness, nay, even familiarity. A mis- 
tress who is sure of her own position, and safely 
entrenched in her own quiet dignity, may be 
almost a mother to her servants without fearing 
from them the slightest over-familiarity. Nay, 
she will not lose their respect by actually helping 
in their work, or at least showing them that she 
knows how the work should be done, as was 
the habit with the ladies of olden time. A 
cook will not think the worse of her mistress 
if, instead of ringing the bell and scolding 
violently over an ill-cooked dinner, she descends 
to the kitchen and takes the pains to explain all 
the deficiencies of to-day, showing how they 
may be remedied to-morrow. And if this is 
done carefully and kindly, the chances are 



198 



MY BROTHER'S KEEPER. 



that they will be remedied ; and a little tem- 
porary trouble will avoid endless trouble after- 
wards. 

Fault-finding is inevitable ; reproof, sharp and 
unmistakable, is sometimes necessary, nay, 
saluta^ ; dismission, instant and sudden, with- 
out hope of reprieve or forgiveness, may occa- 
sionally be the only course possible ; but no head 
of a household is justified in using towards any 
of its members one rough, or harsh, or con- 
temptuous word. The mistress who scolds, and 
the master who swears at a servant, at once put 
themselves in a false position, sink from their 
true dignity, and deserve any impertinence they 
get. 

" Impertinence ! " I once heard remarked by a 
lady, a house-mother for many years, "why, I 
never had an impertinent word from a servant 
in my life." 

Of course not, because in all her dealings with 
them she herself was scrupulously courteous — as 
courteous as she would have been to any of her 
equals, friends, or acquaintances. She had 
sense to see that, putting aside the duty of it, 



MY BROTHER'S KEEPER. i 9y 

one of the chief differences between class and 
class, superior and inferior, educated and un- 
educated, is this unvarying politeness. I shall 
never forget watching an altercation between two 
London omnibus drivers — the one heaping on 
the other every opprobrious name he could think 
of; while his rival, sitting calmly on the box, 
listened in silence, then turned round to reply, 
"And you — you're a" — he paused, "you're a 
gentleman ! ' ; The satire cut sharp. Omnibus 
No. i drove away amidst shouts of laughter, 
mingled with hisses ; omnibus No. 2 remained 
master of the field. 

So, whatever may be the conduct of her ser- 
vants, the " missis " loses her last hold over them 
if, however provoked, she allows them by any 
word or deed of hers to doubt that she is a 
lady. 

And servants have a far keener appreciation 
of a " real lady," as they call it, than we give 
them credit for. They seldom fail to distinguish 
between the born gentlewoman, however poor, 
and the nouveau riche, whom only her riches 
make different from themselves. They are 



200 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER. 

sharp enough to see that, as a rule, the born or 
educated gentlewoman, sure of herself and her 
position, will treat them much more familiarly 
and kindly than the other. And this kindness, 
even unaccompanied by tangible benefactions, 
what a powerful agent it is ! 

Of course, there are those whom we may em- 
phatically term " the lower classes/' who seem 
to consider the upper class not only their 
keepers, but their legitimate prey. But there 
are others, over whom gentleness of speech, 
thoughtfulness in word and act, a desire to save 
them trouble, a little pains taken to procure 
them some innocent pleasure, have a thousand 
times more influence than gifts, or even great 
benefits carelessly bestowed. 

And here, among the duties of heads of families 
I would include one, too often overlooked, that 
of giving their servants a fair amount of actual 
pleasure. "All work and no play make Jack 
a dull boy," and the kitchen requires relaxation 
as well as the parlour. Not an occasional " day 
out," grudgingly given, and with a complete 
indifference as to where and how it is spent, 



MY BROTHER'S KEEPER. 201 

but a certain amount of variety and amusement 
regularly provided. 

The question is, what this should be ; and there 
each individual family must decide for itself. I 
differ from that eloquent defender of servants' 
rights, who would put the pianoforte side by 
side with the dresser, and mix elegant literature 
with the cleaning of saucepans ; but I do think 
that any servant with an ear for music or a taste 
for reading should be encouraged in every 
possible way that does not interfere with daily 
duty. " Work first, pleasure afterwards," should 
be the mistress's creed, for herself, her children, 
her servants ; and she will generally find the 
work all the better done for not forgetting the 
pleasure. 

Ignorance is at the root of half the errors of 
this world; errors which soon develop into 
actual sins. In spite of the not unfrequently 
given opinion that it is a mistake to educate our 
inferiors, and that the march of intellect of late 
years has been the cause of most of the evils 
from which we now suffer, I think it will 
always be found that the cleverer and better 



202 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER. 

educated servants are, the greater help and 
comfort they prove in a household. 

And oh, what a help, what a comfort ! " Bet- 
ter is a friend that is near than a brother afar off," 
says Solomon. And often, in the cares, worries, 
and hard experiences of life, far better than even 
the friends outside the house are the faithful 
servants within it, who offer us no obtrusive 
sympathy, no well-meant yet utterly useless 
and troublesome advice, but simply do what we 
tell them, or know us well enough to do what 
we want without our telling ; and by their re- 
gular mechanical ways make things smooth and 
comfortable about us, thereby creating an un- 
conscious sense of repose amidst the sharpest 
trials. If I were to name the greatest domestic 
blessing that the mother of the family can have, 
next to a good and dutiful child, it is a faithful 
servant. 

But, as I have said before, the blessing must 
be earned. And even in these days, it is in 
every one's power to earn it. Even if the present 
generation has so greatly deteriorated that a 
satisfactorily trained servant is almost impos- 



MY BROTHER 'S KEEPER. 203 

sible to find, there is always the raw material, 
the new generation, to work upon. Every mis- 
tress of a household, every clergyman of a 
parish, with other responsible agents who form 
the centre of a circle of dependants, may with a 
little pains keep their eyes upon all the growing- 
up girls and boys around them, catch them 
early, and guide them for good, in all sorts of 
practical ways. Of course this gives trouble — 
everything in life gives trouble ; it requires 
common sense and patience — qualities not too 
abundant in this world. But the thing can be 
done, and those who do it will rarely fail to 
reap the benefit. For it is one of those forms 
of charity which pays itself — "small profits and 
quick returns." And though this may be a mean 
reason to urge, just like the maxim that 
honesty is the best policy, still there are 
people in this world who will not be the less 
charitable for knowing that charity is a good 
investment. 

It is especially so, when beginning at home 
it goes on to widen into the circles nearest home. 
There is a subject which has been well talked 



204 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER. 

over in public meetings, well discussed in news- 
papers, for the last few years, yet remains pretty 
nearly where it stood, when well-to-do people first 
began to open their eyes to it — the condition of 
the poor at their gates. 

The question, Am I my brother s keeper ? is 
as serious to the rich man with regard to the 
dependants outside his doors as within them. 
This, setting aside the question of their spiritual 
state. I do not hold with those who administer 
tracts first and food aftenvards ; and I incline 
to believe that the washing of the soul is very 
useless until the body has been well treated with 
soap and water. Each earnest man has his own 
pet theory for dealing with the spiritual condi- 
tion of those about him ; but for their physical 
state, so far as he can affect it, every man is 
answerable. 

Not in a large way. The great error of be- 
nevolent people nowadays is that they will 
do everything largely. They begin far off, 
instead of near at hand. They will subscribe 
thousands of pounds for the famine in India, 
the widows and orphans of a shipwreck or a 



MY BROTHER 'S KEEPER. 205 

colliery accident, the presenting of a testimonial 
to the widow and children of some notable man, 
who in most cases ought to have himself pro- 
vided for his belongings ; but the duty of seeing 
that the two or three families who depend on 
them have enough wages to live upon, a decent 
house to live in, and some kindly supervision 
and instruction to help them to live a sanitary 
and virtuous life, is far too small a thing for 
your great philanthropists. 

Yet if they would manage to do this, and 
only this — just as every one in a large city is 
compelled to sweep the snow from his own 
doorstep — what an aggregate of advantage 
would be reached ! Each large household is 
a nucleus, round which gather, of necessity, 
several smaller ones. Coachman, groom, gar- 
dener, labourer, outdoor servants of every sort, 
must all trust for their subsistence to the great 
family. Thus, every man with an income of 
from one thousand to indefinite thousands per 
annum has inevitably a certain number, more 
or less, of human souls and bodies dependent on 
him for their well-being. Is he conscious of the 



206 MY BROTHER 'S KEEPER. 

responsibility ? Does he recognise that in this, 
at least, he is his brother's keeper ? 

In large towns things are different. Though 
the poor hang festering upon the very robe's 
hem of the rich, and scarcely any grand street 
or square but has a wretched mews or back alley 
behind it, still the gulf between the two is so 
great that it is difficult to pass it. Then, too, the 
population is so migratory — here to-day, gone 
to-morrow — that any lasting influence is almost 
impossible. The evils only too possible — and 
rich neighbours would do well for their own 
sakes not to forget this — are the crimes that 
lurk, the diseases that breed, in these miserable, 
homeless homes. 

Some people have been bold enough to attempt 
a remedy. Some noble, self-denying souls have 
gone from end to end of these courts and alleys, 
cleansing and reviving, pouring through them 
a wholesome stream of beneficence, which God 
grant may never run dry. For in our large 
cities this melancholy condition of things is 
inevitable. All honour be to them who attempt 
— not a cure, alas ! but even an amelioration. 



MY BROTHER'S KEEPER. 207 

However in the country our landowners and 
large householders have no excuse for their sins. 
For years, ever since Charles Kingsley wrote 
his " Yeast," in which the noble girl, Argemone, 
dies of a fever caught at the miserable cottages 
which had been left year after year undrained, 
unrepaired, a hotbed of disease and contagion, 
the same thing has been going on in country 
villages, lovely and picturesque to the eye, but, 
if you look further, full of all things foul and 
vile. It is as bad or worse in new-built sub- 
urban neighbourhoods, where wealthy residents 
have been so anxious to drive uncomfortable 
neighbours away that there are literally no cot- 
tages. The mechanic has to go to his work, 
or the outdoor servant to his daily calling, miles 
and miles ; and even then house accommodation 
is as wretched as it is limited ; several families 
— not of the very poor, but of people able to 
pay for decent accommodation, if they could 
only get it — are huddled together in some ill- 
drained, ill-ventilated, and worse-built house, 
subdivided and sub-let to the last possibility. 

As the neighbourhood increases, and with it 



208 MF BROTHER'S KEEPER. 

the absolute necessity for a certain number of 
the poor to serve the rich, their need of house- 
room increases too. So great is the press of 
tenants, that rents rise ; grasping builders run 
up, on speculation, wretched strings of cottages, 
bran new and taking on the outside — quite 
" genteel residences " to look at — but within, 
every conceivable want and abomination. 
However bad great towns may be, anybody 
who examines the dwelling-houses of — I will 
not say the poor, but the working classes — in 
the country, has good need to turn to all their 
"brethren" who have money in hand, and ask 
why, when building " palatial mansions " for 
themselves, or even stately churches for — is it 
for Him who expressly says He " dwells not in 
houses made with hands " ? — they cannot spare 
a few hundred pounds to build a few decent cot- 
tages for their humbler neighbours ? Simple, solid 
cottages, where the wind does not whistle through 
one-brick walls, nor the rain soak through 
leaky windows, and the gaudy papering drop 
off with damp ; where water supply and house 
drainage do not mingle — even as the respect- 



MY BROTHER'S KEEPER. 209 

able and the vile, the provident and the impro- 
vident, the sober and the drunkard, are often 
forced to mingle in these wretched homes. Con- 
sequently the best-intentioned helper, the most 
judicious friend, finds it difficult to choose be- 
tween the bad and the good, the careful and 
the untidy, those who deserve to be aided and 
encouraged, and those whom any assistance 
makes only more helpless and more unde- 
serving. 

Nevertheless, we are still our brother's keeper. 
Not our seventeenth cousin — black, olive, or 
brown — but our brother who lives next door to 
us, and for whom we ought to do our very best 
before we go further. Therefore, I say, let 
every man sweep his own doorstep clean. Let 
him take a little trouble to use among his 
immediate dependants all the influence his 
position gives him. Let him try to make them 
good, if he can ; but at any rate let him do his 
utmost to make them comfortable. I have heard 
it said that a thief is not half so likely to steal 
when he has got a clean shirt on ; and I believe 
the master who takes pains to provide his ser- 

P 



2 1 o MY BROTHER 'S KEEPER. 

vants with decent houses, safe from malaria, 
free from overcrowding — nay, who even con- 
descends to look in and see that everything is 
neat and convenient, taking an interest in the 
papers on the walls and the flowers in the 
gardens — would soon cease to complain that 
they wasted or peculated his substance, or 
spent their own in the skittle-ground and the 
taproom. 

But in this matter no absolute laws can be 
laid down, no minutiae particularised. The sub- 
ject is so wide, and each case must be judged 
on its own merits. Every man and woman 
must decide individually how far fortune has 
constituted them their brother's keeper, and to 
what extent they are fulfilling that trust. How 
it should be fulfilled they alone can tell. It 
lies between them and their consciences ; or, to 
speak more solemnly, between them and their 
God. 

" Those whom Thou hast given Me," said 
the divinest Master that ever walked this earth, 
of the men who instinctively called Him by that 
name. And though in this cynical generation it 



MY BROTHER 'S KEEPER. 1 1 1 

may provoke a smile, the mere notion that our 
hired servants, our followers and dependants, 
are given to us by God that we may be His 
agents in guiding and helping them, still 
the fact, if it be a fact, remains the same, 
whether we believe it or not. And I think it 
would be a consolation at many a deathbed — 
deathbeds watched and soothed by some long- 
tried, faithful servant, and oftentimes only a 
servant — to look back through the nearly ended 
life upon a few waifs and strays rescued, a 
few young souls guided in the right way, suf- 
ferers saved from worse suffering, honest " bro- 
thers" and sisters helped, strengthened, and 
rewarded. The world may never know it, for 
it is a kind of beneficence which does not show 
outside ; but I can imagine such a man or 
woman — master or mistress — echoing without 
any pride, but with a sort of thankful gladness, 
the momentous words, " Those that Thou gavest 
me I have kept : and none of them is lost." 



^etmon F£ an* Hast. 
GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS. 



VI. 



GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS. 

T SHOULD premise of this sermon, that it is 
not a very cheerful one, nor meant for the 
very young. They, to whom joy seems as inter- 
minable as sorrow, at the time, will neither 
listen to it nor believe it. But their elders, who 
may have experienced its truth, and had 
strength to accept it as such, may find a certain 
calm even in its sadness. For these I write ; 
not those, until in their turn they have proved 
the same. 

" Gather up the fragments which remain, that 
nothing be lost." So once said the Divine Mas- 
ter, after feeding His hungering five thousand. 
How often, even without relation to the circum- 
stances under which they were first uttered, 
do the mere words flash across one's mind, 



216 GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS. 

in various crises of life ; words full of deep 
meaning — solemn with pathetic warning. 

For to how few has existence been anything 
like perfect, leaving no fragments to be gathered 
up ? Who can say he has attained all his 
desires, fulfilled all his youth's promises ? looks 
back on nothing he regrets, nor desires to add 
anything to what he has accomplished ? 

How many lives are, so to speak, mere relics 
of an ended feast, fragments which may be either 
left to waste, or be taken up and made the most 
of. For we cannot die just when we wish it, 
and because we wish it. The fact may be very 
unromantic, but it is a fact, that a too large 
dinner or a false step on the stairs kills much 
more easily than a great sorrow. Nature com- 
pels us to live on, even with broken hearts, as 
with lopped-off members. True, we are never 
quite the same again ; never the complete 
human being ; but we may still be a very re- 
spectable, healthy human being, capable of 
living out our threescore years and ten with 
tolerable comfort after all. 

Of course this is very uninteresting. It is 






GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS. 217 

not the creed of novels and romances. There 
everybody is happy and married, or unhappy 
and dies. A cynic might question whether, in 
his grand solution of all mundane difficulties, to 
transpose the adjectives, retaining the verbs, 
would not be much nearer the truth ; since death 
ends our afflictions, and marriage very often 
begins them. But your cynics are the most 
narrow- vision ed of all philosophers. Let them 
pass ! Safer and better is it to believe that 
every one may, if he chooses, attain to a cer- 
tain amount of happiness, enough to brighten 
life and make it, not only endurable, but nobly 
useful, until the end. But entire felicity is the 
lot of none, and moreover was never meant 
to be. 

Until we have learnt to accept this fact 
reverently, humbly, not asking the why and 
wherefore, which we can never by any possi- 
bility find out ; until then, our soul's education, 
the great purpose of our being in the body at 
all, is not even begun. We are still in the 
A B C of existence, and many a bitter tear 
shall we have to shed, many an angry fit of 



2 1 8 GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS, 

resistance to both lessons and Teacher, many a 
cruel craving after sunshiny play and deli- 
cious laziness, will be our portion, till we are 
advanced enough to understand why we are 
thus taught. 

It is curious, if it were not so sad, to 
notice how many years of fruitful youth we 
spend less in learning than in wondering why 
we are compelled to learn, why we cannot 
be left to do just as we like, having every- 
thing to enjoy and nothing to suffer. For, 
whether we confess it or not, most of us start 
in life with the conviction that Providence 
somehow owes us a great debt of felicity, and 
if He does not pay it, there must be something 
radically wrong, not with ourselves, of course — 
in youth the last person we doubt is ourself — 
but with the whole management of the universe. 
" Here I am/' the young man or maiden soli- 
loquises. " I wish to be happy ; it is Heaven's 
business to make me happy — me individually, 
without reference to the rest of the world, and 
whether or not I choose to obey the laws laid 
down for the general good. I am I : every 






GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS. 219 

blessing sent me I take as my right; every 
misfortune that befalls me is a cruelty or an 
injustice." 

Odd as this reads, put so plainly, still I be- 
lieve it is, if they will seriously examine them- 
selves, the attitude that most young people take 
towards Providence, and the world in general, 
while they are still young. 

A comfortable doctrine, but having one fault, 
in common with many other doctrines conceived 
out of the arrogant egotism of the human heart 
— it is not true. 

" This God is our God," exclaims the Psalmist, 
adding, joyfully, " He will be our guide unto 
death/' Ay, but He will also be the guide of 
millions more, equally His children, with whom 
we must take our lot ; every minute portion of 
His creation being liable to be made subservient 
to the working of the whole. A working which, 
if not entirely by chance and for evil, must 
necessarily be by design, and for the general 
good of the whole. Any other theory of happi- 
ness strikes a blow at the root of all religious 
faith — the sense of a Divine Fatherhood, not 



220 GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS. 

limited or personal, but unlimited and uni- 
versal. 

For it is God's relation to us, not ours to Him, 
which is the vital question. The great craving 
of humanity is — we want a God to believe in. 
What He wants with us, or does with us, is a 
secondary thing; being God, He is sure to do 
right. I have sometimes smiled to hear deeply 
religious people bless the Lord " for saving my 
poor soul." Why, that is the very last thing 
a creature, with a spark of His nature dwelling 
in it, would dream of blessing Him for ; or that 
He would accept as a fit thanksgiving. Espe- 
cially if that salvation involved, as it usually 
does, the supposed condemnation of unknown 
millions, including many dear friends of the 
devout thanksgiver. That all religion should 
consist merely in the saving of one's own indivi- 
dual soul ! Such a creed is simply the carrying 
out spiritually of that much-despised sentiment, 
"self-preservation is the first law of nature;" 
and the followers of it are as purely selfish as 
the wrecked sailor, who, seizing for himself a 
spar or a hencoop — -nay, let us say at once, a 




GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS. 221 

comfortable boat — calmly watches all his mates 
go down. For this, plainly put, is the position 
of many an earnest worshipper towards his self- 
invented God. But what a worshipper ! and 
oh, not to speak it profanely, what a God ! 

You will perceive, this sermon is clearly " out 
of church/' and would put me outside the pale of 
many churches. Not, I trust, outside that of 
the church invisible, spread silently over the 
whole visible world. Because " Gather up the 
fragments" is a text which it is useless for me to 
preach upon, or you to listen to, unless we both 
have a strong spiritual sense — a conviction of the 
nothingness of all things human, except those 
which bind the soul to its Maker, which we 
call religious faith. And though I am far from 
believing that the present world is nothing, and 
the world to come everything; that we are to 
console ourselves for every grief, and repay our- 
selves for every resignation, by the idea that 
thereby we somehow or other make God our 
debtor, ready to requite us in another existence 
for all we have lost, or wilfully thrown away, 
in this ; still, it is hopeless either to teach or 



222 GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS. 

learn the difficult lesson, which, in plain words, 
I may call " making the best of things/' with- 
out a firm trust, first in His love who bids us do 
it, secondly in our own duty of obedience to His 
paramount will, in great things and small, 
simply because it is His will, whether we under- 
stand it or not. 

Therefore, I am no heretic, though I may say 
things that make orthodoxy shudder; perhaps 
because it has a secret fear that they may be 
true after all. 

These " fragments " of lives — how they strew 
our daily path on every side ! Not a house do 
we enter, not a company do we mix with, but 
we more than guess — we know — that these our 
friends, men and women, who go about the 
world, doing their work and taking their plea- 
sure therein, all carry about with them a secret 
burden — of bitter disappointments, vanished 
hopes, unfulfilled ambitions, lost loves. Pro- 
bably every one of them, when his or her smiling 
face vanishes from the circle, will change it into 
another, serious, anxious, sad — happy, if it be 
only sad, with no mingling of either bitterness 



GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS. 223 

or badness. That complete felicity, which the 
young believe in, and expect almost as a matter 
of certainty to come, never does come. Soon 
or late, we have to make up our minds to do 
without it ; to take up the fragments of our 
blessings, thankful that we have what we have, 
and are what we are ; above all that we have 
our own burden to bear, and not our neigh- 
bour's. But, whatever it is, we must bear it 
alone ; and this gathering-up of fragments, 
which I am so earnestly advising, is also a thing 
which must be done alone. 

The lesson is sometimes learnt very early. 
It is shrewdly said, "At three we love our 
mothers, at six our fathers, at twelve our holi- 
days, at twenty our sweethearts, at thirty our 
wives, at forty our children, at fifty ourselves." 
Still, in one form or other, love is the ground- 
work of our existence. 

So, at least, thinks the passionate boy or 
sentimental girl who has fallen under its in- 
fluence. For I suppose we must all concede 
the everyday fact that most people fall in 
love some time or other, and that a good many 



2 24 GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS. 

do it even in their teens. You may call it 
" calf-love," and so it often is ; and comes to 
the salutary end of such a passion — 

" Which does at once like paper set on fire, 
Burn — and expire." 



But it gives a certain amount of pain and 
discomfort during the conflagration, and often 
leaves an ugly little heap of ashes behind. 

Also, it is well to be cautious ; as the fool- 
ishest of fancies may develop into a real love 
— the blessing or curse of a lifetime. 

" Fond of her," I heard an old man once an- 
swer, as he stood watching his wife move slowly 
down their beautiful but rather lonely garden ; 
they had buried eight of their nine children, 
and the ninth was going to be married that 
spring. " Fond of her ? " with a gentle smile, 
" Why, I've been fond of her these fifty years ! ' 

But such cases are very exceptional. It is so 
seldom that one love — a happy love — runs like a 
golden thread through the life of either man or 
woman, that we ought to be patient even with 
the most frantic boy, or forlorn girl, who has 



GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS 225 

" fallen in love," and is enduring its first sharp 
pleasure — or pain— for both are much alike. 

When they come and tell you that their hearts 
are broken, it is best not to laugh at them, but 
to help them to " gather up the fragments " as 
soon as possible. At first, of course, they will 
not agree that it is possible. " This or nothing ! ' 
is the despairing cry ; and though we may hint 
that the world is wide, and there may be in it 
other people, at least as good as the one par- 
ticular idol, still we cannot expect them to 
believe it. Disappointed lovers would think it 
treason against love to suppose that life is to 
be henceforward anything than a total blank. 
It is so, sometimes ; heaven knows ! I con- 
fess to being one of those few who, in this age, 
dare still to believe in love, and in its awful 
influence, for good or for evil, at the very 
outset of life. But it is not the whole of life : 
nor ought to be. 

The prevention of a so-called " imprudent " 
marriage — namely, an impecunious one — and 
the forcing on of another, which had nothing 
in the world to recommend it except money, 

Q 



226 GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS. 

has often been the ultimate ruin of a young 
man, who would have been a good man, 
had he been a happy man; had he married 
the girl he loved. And in instances too nume- 
rous to count, have girls — through the common 
but contemptible weakness of not knowing their 
own minds, or the worse than weakness of being 
governed by the minds of others in so exclu- 
sively a personal matter as marriage — driven 
honest fellows into vice. Or else, into some 
reckless, hasty union, whereby both the man 
himself and the poor wife, whom he never 
loved but only married, were made miserable 
for life. 

Generally speaking, men get over their love- 
sorrows much easier than women. Naturally ; 
because life has for them many other things 
besides love ; for women, almost nothing. But 
still one does find occasionally a man, pros- 
perous and happy, kind to his wife, and de- 
voted to his children, in whom the indelible 
trace of some early disappointment is, that one 
name is never mentioned, one set of associa- 
tions entirely put aside. He is a good fellow 



GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS. 227 

— a cheerful fellow too ; he has taken up the 
fragments of his life and made the very best 
of them. Yet, sometimes, you feel that the 
life would have been more complete, the cha- 
racter more nobly developed, if the man had 
had his heart's desire, and married his first 
love. 

Which nobody does, they say ; certainly, 
almost nobody ; ■ yet the world wags on ; and 
everybody seems satisfied — at least, in public. 
Nay, possibly, in private too ; for time has 
such infinite power of healing or hiding. There 
is nothing harder than a lava stream grown 
cold. 

Those of us who have reached middle age 
without dropping — who would ever drop ? — the 
ties of our youth, move about encircled by 
dozens of such secret histories, forgotten by 
the outside world — half forgotten, perhaps, by 
the very actors therein — with whom we, the 
spectators, had once such deep sympathy. Now, 
we sometimes turn and look at a face which 
we remember as a young face, alive with all 
the passion of youth — and we marvel to see 



228 GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS. 

how commonplace it has grown ; reddening 
cosily over a good dinner, or sharp and eager 
over business greed ; worn and wrinkled with 
nursery cares, or sweetly smiling in a grand 
drawing-room, ready to play its 

" Petty part, 
With a little hoard of maxims preaching down a daughter's heart." 

A sort of gathering-up of fragments which 
those who are weak enough, or strong enough, 
still to believe in love, will think far worse 
than any scattering. 

The young will not believe us when we tell 
them that their broken hearts may be mended ; 
ought to be ; since life is too precious a thing 
to be wasted over any one woman, or man 
either. It is given us to be made the most of; 
and this, whether we ourselves are happy or 
miserable. The misery will not last — the 
happiness will ; if only in remembrance. No 
pure joy, however fleeting, contains any real 
bitterness, even when it is gone by. 

But time only will teach this. At first there 
is nothing so overwhelming as the despair of 
youth, which sees neither before it nor behind ; 



GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS. 229 

refuses to be laughed out of, or preached out 
of, its cherished woe, which it deems a matter 
of conscience to believe eternal. 

It will not be eternal ; but best not to say so 
to the sufferer. Best to attempt neither argu- 
ment nor consolation, only substitution. Hard 
work, close study, a sudden plunge into the 
serious business of life, that the victim may 
find the world contains other things besides 
love, is the wisest course to be suggested 
by those long-suffering, much-abused beings, 
parents and guardians. Love is the best 
thing — few deny that ; but life contains many 
supplementary blessings too : honourable am- 
bition, leading to a success well earned and 
well used; to say nothing of that calm strength 
which comes into a young man's heart when 
he has fought with and conquered fate, by 
first conquering himself, the most fatal fate 
of all. 

Commonplace preaching this ! Everybody 
has heard it. Strange, how seldom anybody 
thinks of acting upon it. In the temporary 
madness of disappointment a poor fellow will 



2 3 o GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS. 



go and wreck his whole future ; and when after- 
wards he would fain build up a new life — alas ! 
there is no material left to build with. 

Therefore, it is the duty of those older and 
wiser, who, perhaps, themselves .have waded 
through the black river and landed safe on the 
opposite shore, to show him that it is not as deep 
as it seems, and that it has an opposite shore. 
He may swim through ; with the aid of a stout 
heart and an honest self-respect; self-respect, 
not selfishness — for the most selfish creature 
alive is a young man in love, except towards 
the young woman he happens to be in love 
with. Not seldom, the very best lesson of life — 
bitter but wholesome — is taught to a young man 
by a love-disappointment. 

Not so with women ; they being in this matter 
passive, not active agents. So few girls are " in 
love " nowadays ; so many set upon merely 
getting married, that I confess to a secret re- 
spect for any heart which has in it the capacity 
of being " broken." Not that it does break, un- 
less the victim is too feeble physically to fight 
against her mental suffering ; but the anguish is 



GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS. 231 

sore at the time. There is no cure for it, except 
one, suggested by a little girl I know, who with 
the innocent passion of six and a half adored a 
certain " beautiful Charlie " of nineteen. Some 
one suggested that Charlie would marry and 
cease to care for her. "Then I should be so 
unhappy/' sighed the sad little voice. — " What, 
if he married a wife he was very fond of, and 
who made him quite happy — would you be 
unhappy then ?" — " No !" was the answer, given 
after a slight pause, which showed this conclu- 
sion was not come to without thought. "No! 
I would love his wife, that's all." 

The poor little maid had jumped by instinct — 
womanly instinct — to the true secret of faithful 
love — the love which desires, above all, the 
good of the beloved, and therefore learns to be 
brave enough to look at happiness through 
another's eyes. 

This is the only way by which any girl can 
take up the fragments of a lost or unrequited 
affection ; by teaching herself, not to forget it — 
that is impossible — but to rise above it ; until the 
sting is taken out of her sorrow, and it becomes 



232 GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS. 

gradually transformed from a slow poison into 
a bitter but wholesome food. 

Besides, though the suggestion may seem far 
below the attention of poetical people, there are 
such things as fathers and mothers, brothers and 
sisters, and other not undeserving relations, to 
whom a tithe of the affection wasted upon some 
(possibly) only half-deserving young man would 
be a priceless boon. And so long as the world 
endures there will always be abundance of 
helpless, sick, and sorrowful people calling on 
the sorrow-stricken one for aid, and ready to 
pay her back for all she condescends to give 
with that grateful affection which heals a 
wounded heart better than anything — except 
work. 

Work, work, work ! That is the grand pa- 
nacea for sorrow ; and, mercifully, there is no end 
of work to be done in this world, if anybody will 
do it. Few households are so perfect in their 
happy self-containedness that they are not glad 
oftentimes of the help of some lonely woman, to 
whom they also supply the sacred consolation of 
being able to help somebody, and thus perhaps 




GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS. 233 

save her from throwing herself blindly into some 
foolish career for which she has no real voca- 
tion, except that forced upon her by the sickly 
fancy of sorrow. For neither art, nor science, 
nor religion will really repay its votaries, if they 
take to it, like opium-eaters, merely to deaden 
despair. 

And here I must own to a certain sympathy 
with those sisterhoods — yes, even Roman Ca- 
tholic sisterhoods — who hold out pitying arms 
to sufferers like these ; disappointed maidens, 
unhappy wives, childless widows ; struck by 
some one of the many forms of incurable grief 
which are so common among women, whose 
destiny generally seems less to conquer than to 
endure. Of course, the natural duties, those 
which lie close at hand, are safest and best ; but 
such do not come to all, and any duties are 
better than none ; any work, even the painful 
and often revolting toil of a sister of charity, is 
safer than idleness. 

For, say what you will, and pity them as 
you may, these broken hearts are exceedingly 
troublesome to the rest of the world. We do 



23+ GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS. 



not like to see our relatives and friends going 
about with melancholy faces, perpetually weep- 
ing over the unburied corpse of some hopeless 
grief or unpardonable wrong. We had much 
rather they buried it quietly, and allowed us 
J after a due season of sympathy to go on our 
way. Most of us prefer to be comfortable if we 
can. I have always found those the best liked 
people who have strength to bear their sorrows 
themselves, without troubling their neighbours. 
And the sight of all others most touching, most 
ennobling, is that of a man or woman whom we 
know to have suffered, perhaps to be suffering 
still, yet who still carries a cheerful face, is a 
burden to no friend, nor casts a shadow over 
any household — perhaps quite the contrary. 
Those whose own light is quenched are often 
the light -bringers. 

To accept the inevitable ; neither to struggle 
against it nor murmur at it, simply to bear it — 
this is the great lesson of life — above all to a 
woman. It may come late or early, and the 
learning of it is sure to be hard, but she will 
never be a really happy woman until she has 



, 



GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS. 235 

learnt it. I have always thought two of the 
most pathetic pictures of women's lives ever 
given are Tennyson's "Dora" — 

"As time 
Went onwards, Mary took another mate : 
But Dora lived unmarried to her death," 

and Jeanie, in " Auld Robin Gray," who says, 
with the grave simplicity of a God-fearing Scots- 
woman — 

" I daurna think o' Jamie, for that wad be a sin ; 
So I will do my best a gude wife to be, 
For Auld Robin Gray is vera kind to me." 

Besides lost loves, common to both men and 
women, there are griefs which belong perhaps 
to men only — lost ambitions. It is very sore for a 
man just touching, or having just pased, middle 
age, slowly to find out that he has failed in the 
promise of his youth ; failed in everything — 
aspirations, hopes, actions — a man of ' whom 
strangers charitably say, " Poor fellow, there's a 
screw loose somewhere ; he'll never get on in 
the world." And even his nearest friends begin 
mournfully to believe this ; they cease to hope, 
and content themselves in finding palliatives for 



236 GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS. 

a sort of patient despair. That "loose screw " 
— heaven knows what it is, or whether he him- 
self is aware of it or not — always seems to pre- 
vent his succeeding in anything ; or else, with- 
out any fault of his own, circumstances have 
made him the wrong man in the wrong place, 
and it is too late now to get out of it. Pride and 
shame alike keep him silent ; yet he knows — 
and his friends know, and he knows they know 
it — that his career has been, and always will be, 
a dead failure ; that the only thing left for him is 
to gather up the fragments of his vanished 
dreams, his lost ambitions, his wasted labours, 
and go on patiently to the end. He does so, 
working away at a business which he hates, or 
pursuing an art which he is conscious he has no 
talent for, or bound hand and foot in a mesh of 
circumstances against which he has not energy 
enough to struggle. Whatever form of destiny 
may have swamped him, he is swamped, and for 
life. 

Yet even in a case like this, and there are few 
sadder, lies a certain consolation. People prate 
about heroes, but one sometimes sees a simple, 



GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS. 237 

commonplace man, with nothing either grand 
or clever about him, who, did we only know it, 
is more worthy the name of hero than many a 
conqueror of a city. Ay, though all the dream- 
palaces of his youth may have crumbled down ; 
or, like the Arabs, he may have had to build 
and live in a poor little hut under the ruins of 
temples that might have been. But One beyond 
us all knows the story of this pathetic " might- 
have-been," and has pity upon it — the pity that, 
unlike man's, wounds not, only strengthens and 
heals. 

For, after all, patience is very strong. Making 
a mistake in the outset of life is like beginning 
to wind a skein of silk at the wrong end. It 
gives us infinite trouble, and perhaps is in a 
tangle half through, but it often gets smooth 
and straight before the close. Thus, many a 
man has so conquered himself, for duty's sake, 
that the work he originally hated, and therefore 
did ill, he gets in time to do well, and conse- 
quently to like. In the catalogue of success and 
failure, could such be ever truthfully written, it 
would be curious to note those who had sue- 



2 3 8 GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS. 

ceeded in what they had no mind to, and failed 
in that which they considered their especial 
vocation. A man's vocation is that to which 
he is." called ; " only sometimes he mistakes the 
voice calling. But the voice of duty there is 
no mistaking, nor its response ; in the strong 
heart, the patient mind, the contented spirit, — 
especially the latter, which, while striving to 
the utmost against what is not inevitable, when 
once it is proved to be inevitable, accepts it as 
such, and struggles no more. Still, to do this 
requires not only human courage, but super- 
human faith ; the acknowledgment of a Will 
diviner than ours, to which we must submit, 
and in the mere act of submission find consola- 
tion and reparation. 

This is above all necessary in the most irre- 
parable shattering of any lot — an unhappy mar- 
riage. A subject so difficult, so delicate, that I 
would shrink from touching on it, were it not 
so terribly common, so mournfully true. 

Yes ; optimists may deny, and pessimists 
exult in, the fact ; but I am afraid it is a fact — 
that few marriages are entirely happy. As 



GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS. 239 

few, perhaps, as those single lives which are 
proverbially supposed to be so miserable. This, 
because the average of people are, voluntarily or 
unvoluntarily, only too prone to be miserable; 
and those that are unhappy single, will not 
be cured by marriage, but will rather have the 
power of making two people wretched instead ot 
one. Add to this, the exceeding rashness with 
which people plunge into a " state" which, as 
Juliet says — 

"Well thou knowest is full of doubt and fear." 

The wonder is, not that some married people 
are less happy than they hoped to be, but that 
any married people, out of the honeymoon, 
or even in it, are ever happy at all. 

Also, it is curious to observe how many per- 
sons seem actually to enjoy misery ; to throw 
away their good things, and fasten deliberately 
on their evil things ; so that each day — instead 
of being a rejoicing over blessings that, possibly, 
are, like daily bread, only for the day — is wasted 
in dreary complainings ; regrets for what is not, 
rather than thanksgivings for what is. It all 
springs from the strange idea before adverted 



2 4 o GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS. 



to, that heaven is somehow our debtor for end- 
less felicity, which if we do not get, or, getting, 
waste and lose, we cry like Jonah over his 
withered gourd, " I do well to be angry." 

As men do — no, not men ; they are mostly 
silent, either from honour or pride — but women, 
when, having made a rash or loveless marriage, 
they wake up to find themselves utterly miser- 
able, and causing misery — all the sharper because 
it is irretrievable. 

And yet that very irretrievableness is its best 
hope. Heretical as the doctrine may seem, I 
believe if one-half of the ordinary marriages 
one sees could have been broken without public 
scandal, they would have been broken, some- 
times even within the first twelve months. But 
the absolute inevitableness of the bond, at least 
in our English eyes, makes it fix itself like an 
iron band round a tree trunk — the very bark 
which it pierces grows over it in time. With 
the woman, at least ; the man is rather different. 
But with both, if truly honourable men and 
women, having made a mistake in marriage, 
which was presumably a voluntary act, they 



GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS. 241 

must abide by it till death. Death, that re- 
morseless breaker of bonds — alike awful to con- 
template by love or by hate. Since, I suppose, 
the most brutally treated wife, the most heavily 
bound and sorely tried husband, would never 
contemplate that release without sensations 
little short of those of a murderer. 

You perceive I am not one of those who uphold 
divorce. I believe that from no cause, except 
that which the New Testament gives as a 
reason for a man's, putting away his wife, or a 
woman her husband, should the tie be al- 
lowed to be broken ; at least, not so as to admit 
of either party marrying another. The Catholic 
Church is not far wrong in holding marriage 
to be a sacrament, and its dissolution impos- 
sible ; though there are cases in which we must 
admit the right — nay the necessity — of total 
and life-long separation. But only in extreme 
cases, and when to go on enduring hopeless 
misery would sacrifice others beside the parties 
themselves. These two, undoubtedly, alas ! fall 
under the lash of that grim truth, " If you make 
your own bed, you must lie upon it." 

R 



24-2 GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS. 

And is it not sad — if it were not often so 
heroic — the way people do lie on it ? with the 
iron spikes eating into their very flesh ; making 
no complaint, keeping a fair outside to the 
world, and telling heaps of innocent lies, which 
deceive nobody, except perhaps those who tell 
them. 

A perfect marriage is as rare as a perfect 
love. Could it be otherwise, when both men 
and women are so imperfect ? Could aught else 
be expected ? Yet all do expect it. Does not 
every young couple married believe they are 
stepping from the church door into entire feli- 
city, to end only with their lives ? Yet, look 
at them ten, fifteen, twenty years after, and 
how have those lives turned out ? Should some 
old friend pay them a visit, will he or she 
return, envying their felicity, as perhaps on 
that wedding morning ; or hugging themselves 
in their own independent old-bachelorship, or 
peaceful old-maidism, thinking happiness is, 
after all, a much more equally spread thing 
than they once supposed ? 

So it is. Though, according to the old joke, 



GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS. 243 

married people are often like little boys bathing, 
who cry with chattering teeth to the boys on 
the shore, "Do come in, it's so warm/' — it is 
not always warm. There is no sadder picture — 
if it were not such an everyday picture — than 
two young people, married perhaps for love, 
at any rate for liking, but married in haste, to 
repent at leisure ; which they piteously do. 
Knowing little or nothing of each other's tem- 
per, taste, character, they slowly wake up to 
find these so diverse, that it was morally im- 
possible they could have been happy, for very 
long ; and here they are, tied together, in the 
most intimate union that life allows, for ever. 
A thought absolutely maddening ;— at first, and 
with people of sensitive or impulsive natures. 
I fear, if we could look into our neighbours' 
hearts, the catalogue of suicides never com- 
mitted, of elopements unaccomplished, even 
of unperpetrated murders, would be, to those 
who see no difference between the thought and 
the act — something startling, nay, appalling. 

But these tragedies do not happen — at least, 
not often. They drop into "genteel comedy." 



2+4 GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS. 

" Can two walk together, unless they be agreed?" 
Very many couples are not " agreed," far from 
it ; yet seeing they must walk together some- 
how, they make up their minds to do it, and 
they do do it. Ay, in spite of good-natured 
friends, who cannot help observing how unhappy 
they are, and perhaps how happy they might both 
have been if each had been married to a dif- 
ferent sort of person. But this is not the case : 
they are married to the person whom they 
themselves chose, or fate chose for them. The 
thing is done, and there is no undoing it. 

None ; for the unavoidable bigamies and inno- 
cent adulteries so popular nowadays are to all 
right-minded, I will not even say Christian 
people, actual sin ; simple, absolute, inexcusable 
sin. No nonsense about " elective affinities " 
and " platonic friendships " can excuse the small- 
est trifling with the sanctity of the marriage bond. 
The empty heart must remain empty for ever. 

Yet it is pitiful — most pitiful ! especially if 
the couple are not bad, only ill-assorted, and 
young still ; young enough to make a pos- 
sible future of twenty or thirty years look so 



e 



GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS. 245 

black in the distance ! haunted by the pale 
phantom of dead love, the wretched will-o'- 
the-wisp of a lost happiness. God help them, 
poor souls ! No wonder such a lot should drive 
men wicked, and women mad ; as it does, oftener 
perhaps than the world knows. 

For such a grief is of necessity a secret one. 
The husband pays all outward respect to his 
silly, bad-tempered wife ; the wife hides all her 
husband's faults and exalts his virtues. Both do 
their best to take up the fragments that remain, 
pretending all is exactly as they desire ; throw- 
ing dust in their neighbours' eyes ; and, partly 
from pride, partly from shame, sometimes from 
mere worldly prudence, keeping up appearances 
before the world. Whatever the motive, it 
answers the purpose — a righteous purpose too. 
Society is not scandalized, the home is not 
broken up, friends and kindred are not troubled. 
They only guess ; they really know nothing. 
And if guessing something, they look on in 
compassionate sympathy : they attempt no help 
or advice, for none is asked ; it would be rather 
resented than not. The fragments must be 



246 GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS. 

gathered up alone, by each forlorn sufferer, out 
of the depths of the suffering heart. And 
how ? 

It is a curious opposite picture to our 
vaunted English " love " marriages that the 
French "arranged" marriages often turn out so 
well. The reason is apparent. Two people 
cannot live long together in indifference. The 
tie between a married pair, howsoever married, 
must be one of either love or hate ; and, being 
an indissoluble tie — also, few people being wholly 
wicked or entirely detestable — the chances are 
that in time it becomes the former. One by one 
they discover each other's virtues, and learn to 
be tender over each other's faults. Having, un- 
like lovers, only the future to deal with, no dead 
past to bury out of sight, they are kinder to one 
another even than those who were once much 
more than kind. For there is no injustice deeper 
than the conscience-stricken injustice of a wan- 
ing love — no cruelty sharper than that of apo- 
states to a forsaken idol. And it might be a nice 
question for some modern Court of Love to 
decide — which is the bitterest lot, to cling 






GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS. 247 

through life to a love unfulfilled, or to have 
attained one's heart's desire, and found the object 
not worth possessing ? 

Nevertheless, the saving fact which I have 
acknowledged and accounted for concerning 
these "manages de convenance," which we in 
England condemn so much, gives a hope for 
those almost more hopeless "love" marriages, 
which, beginning so brightly, sink slowly 
into permanent gloom, and end — who knows 
how ? — unless there come to the rescue that 
"stern daughter of the voice of God" — Duty — 
which is still " loved of love," and has often- 
times the power to revive love, even when to all 
outward eyes it is dead for ever. 

Duty — pure duty — without any thought of 
personal reward or personal happiness — is the 
strongest, sweetest, most sacred force that do- 
mestic life possesses. And it brings with it its 
own consolations ; not perhaps the consolation it 
craves — it is strange how seldom heaven gives 
us poor mortals exactly what we desire — but 
something else, in substitution. How many a 
sorrowful woman heals her bruised heart beside 



248 GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS. 

• 

her baby's cradle ! How many a disappointed, 
lonely man — to whom his wife is no companion 
and no helpmeet — takes comfort in his baby 
daughter, and looks forward hopefully to the 
time when she will be a grown woman ; his 
friend and solace, the sharer of his tastes and 
humourer of his innocent hobbies —all, in short, 
that her mother might have been, but is not ! 
Yet he will not love her mother the less, but 
rather the more, for the child's sake. 

He is right, and the forlorn woman is right, 
who, having missed the highest bliss, has 
strength to take up the fragments of a secondary 
one ; so that, in the divine and comforting words 
before referred to, "nothing be lost." If she 
has children, she loves them, often passionately ; 
not alas ! for the father's sake ; but they teach 
her to be patient with the father for the sake of 
his children. "While the man who, however in- 
ferior his wife may be — and, the glamour of 
passion ended, he knows her to be, and knows 
that all the world knows it too — never allows 
her to suffer for his own rash mistake, but pays 
her all tender respect as the mistress of his 




GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS. 249 

house and the mother of his offspring — that 
man, who, whatever his inward sufferings, be- 
trays nothing, and makes no one miserable but 
himself, will have at least the peace of a quiet 
conscience. As he goes about the world, doing 
his duty therein, with a calm brow and a reti- 
cent tongue — whatever people suspect, be sure 
they will say nothing. He has accepted his lot, 
taken up his burden ; and will carry it through 
life, steadily, nobly, uncomplainingly. There- 
fore, man will honour him, and God will sustain 
him — to the end. 

Also, burdens lighten — or else the back gets 
used to them by degrees. How many a house 
do we enter, and witnessing its secret cares, 
think — not without thankfulness — that we can 
bear our own troubles, but we could not bear 
theirs. Yet we see they are borne, even with 
apparent unconsciousness, by those accustomed 
to them. The endless snarling and pitiless 
fault-finding of a bad-tempered man passes harm- 
lessly over his placid, brave-hearted wife; the 
intolerable silliness, or churlishness, or selfish- 
ness of one member of a family is perhaps 



2 5 o GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS. 



hardly noticed by the rest. We have all so 
much to put up with from other people — and 
other people the same, or worse, from us — 
that even love itself will not stand upright, 
unless it has the strong backbone of duty to 
keep it upright. That is (if I can put it clearly 
without falling into cant phraseology) unless in 
great things and small we are guided by a 
motive below and above ourselves and our per- 
sonal interests ; unless, in short, every love we 
have is made subservient to the love of God. 

If this be so, surely it is possible, even after 
shipwrecks like these, not to let ourselves drift 
away into a sea of despair. The vessel has 
gone down, but there may be a little boat some- 
where ; our sail may be torn to ribbons, but we 
have oars still ; if we cannot row, perhaps we 
can swim. Somehow or other we may touch 
land. 

But there is one wreck in which the sufferers 
can never touch land, unless it be the Land 
Eternal — I mean the fate of those who find 
themselves smitten with incurable disease, or 
doomed to hopeless invalidism. It may be 



50 



GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS. 251 

exalting matter over mind, placing the physical 
above the spiritual, but I think to be imprisoned 
for life in a miserable body which hampers and 
paralyzes the soul is as sad a lot as any of the 
sentimental sorrows which are here chronicled. 
The more so as it is such an every-day occur- 
rence that it excites little compassion. 

We lavish great sympathy upon sudden, acci- 
dental illnesses ; but the chronic sufferers, those 
who carry about with them some perpetual 
pain, for which there is no ease but death ; or 
even the mere valetudinarians, who " never feel 
quite well," cannot do things which other people 
do, and have continually to give up things they 
would like to do, for fear of being a trouble to 
others — these we get so used to that we often 
cease to pity them, or to consider what a heavy 
burden they have to bear, and how much courage 
they need in order to sustain it at all. 

For it is such an essentially solitary burden. 
No healthy person can understand even the small 
misery of feeling " always tired ;'-' and when it 
comes to worse than this, when one has to sit 
still and gaze into long years of helplessness, 



25 2 GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS. 



perhaps acute pain, and, though it is still noon 
day, face the certainty that no genial sun will 
ever burst into that dim twilight — then life grows 
very difficult, very dark. To most, the future is 
so obscure that they can build it up in any 
fanciful way they please ; but to these it is like a 
blank wall with nothing beyond. To sit down and 
face it, knowing that our small round of interests, 
pleasures, or labours can never be wider than 
now, nay, will probably narrow day by day ; 
that we can give no pleasure to anybody, and 
receive little from anybody ; that, somehow or 
other, we know not why, God has made us 
separate from our kind ; to invent a poor 
fragmentary life for ourselves, and bear it by 
ourselves, until death comes to untie the knot 
and lift off the burden — this, I think, is as sad a 
fate as can befall any human being. 

The only way to meet it is that which I have 
already counselled in other but scarcely sharper 
sorrows. Accept it. Cease trying to get well, 
and worrying about each small symptom of 
being worse or better. Remember Hezekiah, 
who " sought not the Lord, but the physicians." 






GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS. 253 

Not that I defend the Peculiar People, who hold 
that prayers are to supersede mustard plais- 
ters, and esteem anointing with oil a substitute 
for good food and wholesome water. Still I do 
think there is something in the solemn peace of 
a soul that has ceased to struggle with its 
body, but takes cheerfully the modicum of health 
allowed it, which actually conduces to that very 
health which is resigned. 

When once an invalid has strength to say, 
" It does not much matter ; at worst I can but 
die," sickness and death itself lose their terrors. 
An old man, a cruel sufferer, once said to me, 
" If my pain is tolerable, I must bear it ; if it is 
intolerable, I shall not have to bear it long." 
Nor had he ; and when, not many days after, 
I stood looking down on the peaceful face, so 
grand in its everlasting calm, with the wrinkles 
all smoothed out, and the irritable contractions 
of pain for ever gone, I wished that to the end 
of my days I might have strength to remember 
those words. 

Remember them, too, you whose life is but the 
fragments of what it might have been, either in 



254 GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS. 

mind or body — for the mind is so strangely 
affected by the body. Yet try to gather up these 
fragments : they may be worth something stilL 
Try to separate the spiritual from the physical 
as much as you can, and when you grow irri- 
table, exacting, prone to see everything in an 
exaggerated light, and to think that never was 
any one so afflicted as you, say to yourself, " It 
is only my body ; I, the real me, must not let it 
conquer me. This flesh is my temporary dun- 
geon, yet— 

" Stone walls do not a prison make, 
Nor iron bars a cage " — 

the * mind innocent and quiet ' may abide with 
me still." 

Ay, and so it often is. Are not some of the 
very sweetest faces we know, faces that memory 
falls back upon and recalls in the tumult of life 
with a sense of rest and peace, those of con- 
firmed invalids, who may have spent years of 
such imprisoment, perhaps only moving from 
bed to sofa, and back to bed ; well aware that 
they never will move elsewhere except to the 
one narrow couch where we all must lie, yet 



GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS. 255 

never complaining, never craving after the outside 
world, which circles noisily round their perpetual 
silence ; exacting no sympathy, — on the contrary, 
giving it to all and any who need. 

"I have no troubles," said, smiling, one of 
those sweet saints, whom most people would 
have considered " a great martyr." " It is you 
others who come to me with all yours." 

So we do, we who are still in the thick of the 
fight ; to these, who seem as if their battle were 
done for ever. How often do we find counsel 
and comfort by the couch of some dear woman 
— it is generally a woman — whom the world 
calls u a terrible sufferer," but whose sufferings 
are the last thing she talks about. She has 
let herself go, and is absorbed in the inte- 
rests of other people. The fragments of her 
life that remain to her she has made so beauti- 
ful, that you almost forget it was ever meant to 
be, like other lives, a perfect whole ; that the 
wasted frame before you was ever a merry baby, 
a happy girl, a young woman looking forward 
to woman's natural destiny. All that is over, yet 
she is not unhappy ; nay, she is actually happy, 



256 GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS. 

in her own way ; no one could look in her face 
and doubt it. But it is a happiness quite 
different from and beyond ours ; something 
which naught earthly can either give or take 
away. 

This is a bright picture, which I would fain 
place opposite to the dark pictures I have drawn, 
compromising nothing and denying nothing ; 
yet saying after all, "Take courage. God 
never leaves Himself without a witness. In the 
deepest darkness is a possibility of light." 

For there is that in the human soul which will 
nol die. Neither mental nor physical suffering 
will kill it before its time. And neither will 
extinguish in it the germ of possible happiness, 
in this world at least ; whether or not in other 
worlds, God knows. But He has said enough 
to prove to us two things — that here on earth 
sin is the only absolute death, and " Deliver us 
from evil " the only true salvation. 

Therefore, mere pain, in all forms, becomes a 
temporary and endurable thing, if we will only 
try to see it as such, accustoming our eyes to 
behold the good rather than the bad ; choosing 



GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS. 257 

in our daily life to eat the food and reject the 
poison. 

Easy enough, one would say, yet nobody does 
it, People sit and mourn over the fragments 
of their scattered joys, blind to the blessings they 
have, seeking madly for blessings denied. The 
rich complain of their responsibilities, the poor 
of their renunciations. The single think they 
would have been happy married; the married 
reply warningly, " Keep as you are." Many- 
childed parents groan under the burden of that 
bright troop of boys and girls, whom some 
empty household longs enviously for, with an 
angry protest against Providence, whose gifts 
are so unequally divided. Nobody will see his 
own blessings, or open his heart to enjoy them, 
till the golden hour has gone by for ever, and he 
finds out too late all that he might have had 
and might have been. 

A discovery, made sometimes in an empty 
room or by a graveside, knowing that all the 
tears in the world will never lift that stone or 
fill that vacant chair; that all our ceaseless 
complainings, our angry fault-findings, even our 



25 8 GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS. 

real wrongs, sink into nothing before the re- 
morseless stillness of death. Even if life were 
not the absolute whole we expected it to be, if 
our friends were not perfect, nor ourselves either, 
why did we fall into despair, instead of quietly 
setting to work to gather up the fragments that 
remained, suffering nothing to be lost ? Now, 
we never can gather them up any more. The 
great Destroyer has passed by, and there they 
lie — must lie — for ever. 

Gather up the fragments. In every human 
life there are sure to be some. Every one of 
us has a secret chamber somewhere, filled with 
inhabitants whom none but himself can see ; 
it rests with himself alone whether they shall be 
decaying corpses or only beautiful ghosts. 

" God made me what I am, and made my lot 
what He willed it to be," is a truth not incon- 
sistent with the other truth, that He gives us the 
materials to work with, but leaves the workman- 
ship in our own hands. Every man can make 
or mar his own life ; at any rate, it appears so. 
The fact that we know nothing of the results 
of our acts, makes them, as regards ourselves, 



GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS. 259 

absolutely independent ; and the impossibility 
of gazing one inch into the impenetrable 
future comes to the same thing as if we beheld 
it all. 

" Lead Thou me on : I do not ask to see 
The distant scene : one step 's enough for me." 

But that one step must be taken steadily, firmly, 
religiously. There must be no looking back, no 
mourning over the inexorable past. Each day 
— such a little day, and every one circling round 
so quietly that they mount into weeks, and 
months, and years, before we know what we 
have lost or gained ! — each day must be filled 
up, minute by minute, with those duties which 
are in themselves joys, or grow to be. If among 
them ever rises the spectral face of the never- 
forgotten might-have-been — beautiful in its 
eternal youth, perfect in its unattained felicity — 
why fear ? It is but a ghost, and life is a 
reality. 

Ay, a useful, useable, noble reality. Happy, 
too, when once the grim idol Self has been de- 
throned for ever. For it is a truth which we all 
have to learn — oftentimes through many a bitter 



260 GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS. 

lesson — that we never can be happy until we 
cease trying to make ourselves so. 

I said that this would be a rather sad sermon, 
to the young ; but it is not so sad as it seems. 
There comes a time — -to some earlier, to others 
later — when faith has to take the place of hope, 
and better even than bliss is consolation. Surely, 
then, it is something to know, on looking round 
on those about us, men and women, that the 
lives which seem the most complete — that is, 
have most perfectly fulfilled the end for which 
they were given — are very seldom what we call 
"fortunate" lives. Few have been carried out 
exactly as they began ; fewer still have attained 
the felicity they expected. Some — and those 
often the noblest and highest — have been sad- 
dened by one or other of those secret, silent 
tragedies which are always happening around 
us, which we all know, or at least guess at, but 
never speak of; nor do they. 

I once knew a dear old lady — so sweet, so 
bright, so clever ; wearing her eighty years " as 
lightly as a flower." When you talked with 
her you would have thought her a woman of 



GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS. 261 

thirty, so full was she of all the quick sympathy 
of youth, the wise tenderness of middle age. 
Of the weaknesses of old age she had absolutely 
none. Her interest in all those about her was 
such that she never seemed to think of herself 
at all. No complaint, no murmur at her own 
ailments — and she had ailments, and sorrows 
too— ever fell from her lips ; her only anxiety 
was about the cares of other people, and how she 
could lighten them, in great things and small. 
Her bounty knew no limits except her means, 
which were not great; "but," she once said, 
smiling, " I need so little ; and then you see, my 
dear, I always pay my bills every week, so as to 
give no trouble to anybody afterwards/' Thus 
she kept house, with the utmost order, yet with 
ceaseless hospitality. It was indeed the House 
Beautiful, to whose gates all who came departed 
refreshed and strengthened, and whence no 
creature who came in want or grief was ever 
sent empty away. 

I need not name it; many now living will 
remember it ; and none who were familiar 
there could ever forget it, or her, as she sat in 



262 GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS. 

her quiet corner, with her sweet old face, and 
her lovely little ringed hands — peaceful, idle 
hands ; since for some years before she died she 
was nearly blind. Yet her blindness, though, 
coming so late in life, it made her very helpless, 
never made her sad or dull ; she could still 
listen to and join in conversation, and she 
greatly liked society, especially that of the 
young. There was always a tribe of young 
people coming about her, telling her all their 
doings and plannings, their amusements and 
their troubles. She was fond of them, and they 
— they adored her! One girl in particular, 
owned that the first time this dear old lady 
voluntarily kissed her, she felt "as if she had 
been kissed by her first love." 

When she died — at over eighty, certainly, but 
her executors had to guess at the date, for she 
was an old maid, without any near relations, 
and had often said she did not even know her 
own age, it was so long since she was born — 
when she died there was found among her 
private papers a portrait of a young man in a 
foreign military dress. No one could guess who 



GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS. 263 

it was ; the name — there was a name — no one 
had ever heard of. At last some old acquaint- 
ance recalled a far-away tradition of her having 
been once about to be married ; somehow the 
marriage was broken off, but the two remained 
friends, and, it was believed, corresponded and 
occasionally met, till his death, which happened 
when she was about fifty years old. For his 
nephew — and heir, he having died unmarried — 
had then been to see her ; somebody recollected 
having met the young man at her house, and her 
introducing him by name. After that name on 
the miniature all was silence. She was never 
heard to name the name again. Yet she lived 
on for thirty more years. 

"What do you do when you are quite 
alone?" was once asked anxiously of her, when 
she was too blind either to write, or sew, or 
read. 

" What do I do ? My dear, I sit and 
think. I have so much to think about — and so 
many." 

" And are you never dull ?" 

"Dull ? Oh, no ! I am quite happy." 



264 GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS. 

She was, I am sure. You could see it in her 
face ; the peaceful happiness of a soul which has 
ceased to " bother itself " about itself at all, and 
is absorbed in kindly cares for other people. 
Her last act — the last time she ever crossed her 
threshold — was, I remember, a visit of kindness, 
partly as an excuse to take for a drive a person 
who was too feeble to walk much. She was then 
extremely feeble herself; and, climbing a steep 
stair, one who assisted her said anxiously, " I 
fear you are very tired ? ': " Yes," she replied, 
"I am always tired now. But," turning sud- 
denly round with the brightest of smiles, "never 
mind ; it will be all right soon." Four weeks 
after she lay in her final rest, looking so young, 
so pretty, so content ; that those who best loved 
her choked down their sobs and smiled, saying, 
" It was like putting a baby to sleep." 

This is but one story out of many which I 
could tell, even out of my own knowledge, to 
prove that the fragments of a broken life can be 
so gathered up as to make a noble and even a 
happy life unto the end. Many a time, as we go 
on our troublous way through the world, are we 



GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS. 265 

cheered and encouraged by the sight of such ; 
old men who have done their work, and for 
whom is come the time of rest ; the " blind man's 
holiday " between the lights, when they do 
nothing, and nobody expects them to do any- 
thing but look back on the fruits of their labour 
and rejoice ; old women who have their children 
around them, and grandchildren, in whom they 
take over again all a mother's delight freed from 
a mother's anxiety. Lastly — and these are not 
the least numerous, and perhaps the most touch- 
ing of all — unmarried women, whose lives must 
necessarily have been incomplete, barren of joy, 
or clouded with incurable grief ; yet one has but 
to look on their faces, sweet and saintly, to per- 
ceive that their evil has brought forth good — 
that, whatever their own lot may have been, to 
others they have proved a continual blessing. 
How can those fail to be blessed, who are every- 
body's comfort and everybody's help ? 

Occasionally, too, we meet persons, still in 
middle age, for whom, it is easy to see, the sun 
has gone down at noon. Something has hap- 
pened — we know not what, or perhaps we do 



266 GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS. 

know, but never mention it — something which 
will make their future like that of a tree with its 
" leader" broken ; it may not die, it may grow 
up green and strong, but it will never grow tall, 
it will never be a perfect tree. With them, 
too, life in its highest sense is over ; the play 
is played out — the feast is ended ; there is 
nothing left but to gather up the fragments and 
endure. 

And they are gathered. Slowly, painfully 
may be, but it is done. Nothing is lost. No- 
thing remains to cumber, corrupt, or decay. 
Everything available to use still, is used — 
strength, talents, energies, affections ; all that 
God gave has been given back to Him ; not 
perhaps in the way the offerer once desired 
to give it, but nevertheless in the right way, as 
the final result proves. And He has accepted 
the sacrifice ; and requited it, too. Not perhaps 
with earthly felicity ; not at all with the sort of 
felicity longed for; but with something better 
than happiness — peace • that peace which one 
sees sometimes on very suffering faces — it was 
seen continually on the dear old face I have 



GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS. 267 

spoken of — " the peace of God which passeth all 
understanding/' 

There is a psalm of David — poor King David, 
who paid so dearly in sorrow for every sin he 
committed, yet who had strength over and over 
again to gather up the fragments of his piteous 
errorful life, and live on — ay, and to die in faith, 
and in hope of his never-builded temple ; there 
is a psalm, I say, in which he speaks of those 
who " have their portion in this life." He never 
blames them ; he envies them not. Neither does 
he murmur at the will of God, who sees fit to fill 
them with His " hid treasure," and to give them 
the Jew's crowning blessing, " children at their 
desire ; " that they may " leave the rest of their 
substance for their babes." 

" But as for me," he continues, and you can 
almost hear the ringing of the triumphant harp 
— "David's harp of solemn sound" — "as for me, 
I will behold Thy presence in righteousness ; and 
when I awake up after Thy likeness I shall be 
satisfied with it." 

Thoroughly " satisfied." Nothing lost. No- 
thing scattered or wasted. No fragments to be 



268 GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS. 

gathered up ; everything perfect and complete 
in Him — in the fulness of Him which filleth all 
in all. 

May it one day be so with us, my brethren 

and sisters ! Amen. 

***** 

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